The Covenhouse: It was a lovely grande dame of a Colonial house erected by the Plymouth Colony in circa 1624. Painted peach with neat black shuttering and black scrolled trim on the porch and cornices and cupolas, Alek could easily imagine it glowing with romantic yellow candlelight to ward off the chill of the Atlantic, its warmth folded as secure as hands around the Separatists' children, huddled together in their handsewn burnoose and cassocks as they formed an attentive horseshoe around the priest's bench. It was gilded with frost now, adding to its gingerbread charms.
Alek dusted the snow off his coat and went inside. The house seemed momentarily silent, with only the stone-faced walls and timber buttresses and rugged, heavy furniture to greet him. Home, he thought as he did every time. I've come home once more. He let out his breath. The rooms were artfully Spartan with a many-room Colonial compacture that made them cozy even for all the lack of bric-a-brac. Bookshelves bore books. Mantels supported simple amber-glassed Tiffany lamps. Nothing here not worth its weight in use. On the foyer desk was the mail which still occasionally came for him here. He passed a brief eye over it as he worked open the buttons of his coat. Stupid. He had not lived under the Amadeus roof for more than twenty years, not since he was a boy and a ward of the Father's. Stupid also. He imagined how a thought like that could make Father Amadeus cross. One of the Father's favorite idioms, after all, was that a ward of Amadeus was forever. No matter where he traveled in this world of mortals he need never stop learning, need never cease to be a disciple of ancient wisdoms far and wide.
He was hanging his coat on the hat tree by the door when he realized his mistake about the house's apparent vacancy. From the tea parlor came the static sounds of a TV with no volume and voices pitched low, squabbling whispers, the tapping noise of wood on wood. Company. A meeting of some sort. Running a hand through his hair to smooth it, he wondered who else was hanging in tonight, and why. To his utmost surprise he found practically the entire Coven assembled in the Father's drawing room. He stopped in the threshold. For some reason, the sight of so many slayers there, standing or sitting on the chaise lounge and sofa and matching chairs, talking, smoking, and playing dominoes or watching TV did nothing to waylay the curiously ascending feeling of dread he was experiencing tonight.
Five of the seven acolytes, including himself, who comprised the New York City enclave of slayers and made their homes in the city were present The overall impression was of a relaxed, even casual, gathering. At least until Alek stepped through the door and encountered their hooded, fixed expressions.
There was Aristotle, the tech-obsessed young one who, when duty to the Coven wasn't calling, hid away in his home all day making things out of plastic, scrap-metal and electronic circuitry. He glanced up from the game of Mahjongg he was playing alone on the desk by the door and gave Alek a look. Over on the chaise lounge, Takara, the magnificent Oriental warrior dressed in a dark, subdued suitdress like the mild-mannered magazine editor she usually was, lowered the backissue of Cosmo she was perusing. Strapping, mute Robot with his piercing black eyes was next, turning fully away from the Maxfield Parrish-inspired painting over the fireplace mantel he was studying. After him came the slow, thorough scrutiny of Kansas October, their resident duster-wearing cowboy, perched on a window seat and trick-chambering rounds in his vintage .45 Colts. And finally--Eustace, the Father's newest and youngest ward, seated on the floor in front of the silent TV with his history book open in front of him. The Waltons were on and the boy seemed more interested in the adventures of the mountain clan than in his homework. And not really at all interested in the newcomer, apparently, for spare moments after Alek entered the drawing room, the boy was once more completely absorbed in John Boy's current dilemma.
Not so with the others. For a long moment Alek felt torn between either slipping wordlessly past them or holding his ground and shouting the word What?! into the face of their collective scrutiny. He opted for the latter in the end, though without the emotional expletive; eventually, someone would let him in on the secret, though it was never a comfortable task, waiting and facing down the others. Held together by the aims of the Coven but having little else in common, they were not a particularly close bunch of souls, nor prone to loyalty to one another, or to him. Diverse, distinct, and divided by age, race, and religion, the only thing holding them together was their tainted blood and the aims of the Coven. And the Father. Yet, over the years and decades of his indenture to the Coven, Alek had found certain responsibilities falling upon him, a few arbitrary muscles flexed now and again, as if the Father were trying to instigate him as some new axis power present in their midst. But if that was what the Father had in mind, he was probably wasting his time. Slayers cared little for each others' company and even less for his own.
He never discovered the source of their communable dislike for him. Tonight though, feeling a certain doom flutter at the outer edges of his awareness, he felt their revulsion in particular and found it disconcerting, as if he were peeking in on a private moment he had no business being witness to.
Takara, her almond eyes peering out of the flawlessly cold and smooth planes of her face, said, "You were called, whelp. Damned took you long enough to catch on, though." Alek inclined his head, feeling, as always, like a little boy under Takara's scrutiny. Perhaps because in fact she was just old enough to be his grandmother. Yet she had never taken him as a young boy on her knee for a story or given him a jelly foldover like grandmothers were reputed to do. She did give him a broken arm once from an excellently-executed chickenwing when he was fourteen years old, though.
"I'm sorry. I was distracted tonight."
"Dumb as shit," Takara said, going back to Cosmo. Aristotle, who studied Alek's every move with blatant jealously and worship like a boy enthralled by a screen hero or musical superstar, opened his mouth as if to pave over what Takara had uttered, then closed it dutifully, blushed, and went back to his game of tiles. He might worship Alek as his model, but Takara was like a surrogate mother to him. A cold, Kali-inspired mother, to be sure, but a mother nonetheless.
The other immortals did little better than she. Kansas pulled his silver-skinned Colts out of his armpit holsters in a blurring series of quick-draws. Robot went to peruse the Father's vast bookshelves. Eustace, after a moment or two of silence, turned up the volume and started to repeat the dialogue on the TV.
Alek shrugged it off. So he was being called, after all. His ill-feelings were neither a premonition nor malcontent. It was simply the Father pressuring their mental link. Now he knew for certain that he would like nothing better than to escape the house. But the Father was calling him and it was time to face the music, so to speak. He turned away from them and headed down the long sparsely-lit greathall that led to the butler's pantry and the innocuous-looking if key-card-locked basement door and slid his access pass down the cradle.
Querulous frowns, unspoken whispers. He could hear them even here, or imagined he could. It never ceased to amaze him how much slayer society mimicked that of the greater vampire hives, the conceited clichés and ever-scheming circles. He knew a scarce moment after he left the room tongues had begun to wag without restraint.
Poor Eustace, Alek thought, breathing in the dry hallowed smells of the cellar tunnel stairwell leading down into the lower mysteries of the house. It wasn't like when he was a kid and your wardmate was your brother, your blood. Things had changed somewhere along the long line of years and decades. Brotherhood, family, coven--these things seemed to mean less to the newcomers to their little enclave. Little passion remained in the heart of the average slayer; mostly the work was treated with a surgeon's careful yet ultimately impersonal attention. Probably poor Eustace would grow up disillusioned by the whole mess and ask for a desk job before he was thirty years steeped in his craft. The thought made Alek sad. Between the two of them, himself and his chosen brother Booker, they'd been legendary terrors even among their peers.
The flagstone steps, cut giant-wide into the New York bedrock by unrecorded Puritanical chisel and hammer, led down around into the loins of the house. And as if he were still a child, or perhaps only because he was in his child's mind at the moment, Alek counted them to their end. Forty-five. A step for every year of his life. He put out his hands on the last step and felt the warm, ancient wood in the dark beneath his fingers. The heavy double doors which opened on the Great Abbey groaned cantankerously as he pressed against them. But then, Father Amadeus always spoke of them as if they had more character than most individuals. Board planking from off the stern of the Mayflower, or so the stories went. He opened them with deference on the Great Abbey.
As a child looking on the wonder of it, the Great Abbey had reminded him once--and still did--of the pictures of Camelot he'd seen in some storybooks, a richness of tapestries and brass and weeping mortar in flagstone. He found the high grisaille panels in the stonework ceiling immediately, two to each side over the narrow side chapels, and each with a gem of colored citrine stone in its scored center. He stepped inside the nave and was bathed in the hellfire of those precious skylights, the only source of light here save the pylons of lighted candles on iron sconces on the walls. The cobbled promenade rushed down and away to the center of the nave and was flanked on either side by spired Corinthian columns, slender stone giants that rose inexorably upward to meet an ancient bedrock dome where clans of bats regularly roosted, raised and suckled their young and flexed their silent bronze wings in the dark. Below, where he stood, the nave littered out to where the Coventable was set in the shadow of the dais.
Alek moved toward it. Smooth, seamless rosewood, unnailed and unsanctified. In the Great Abbey there were no mosaic puns on the Bible, no stations of the cross crowding the walls, no odor of myrrh or palm leaves or Eucharist to be found, nothing to make an unholy jeer of their violent crusade. The only attempt at comforting the empty spaces were the various swords enshrined in the blood of their masters. And the tapestry art: those lovely, wonderful portraits enshrined in silk, a mythology of figures who had in their toils and talents entered the histories of the Coven and became a part of their eternal making. They looked down on him out of their banners as if to weigh their lives against his own, all of their faces stern, mouths brutal slashes and set under the fierce mad glitter of ancient eyes, eyes so like those in the portraits which still hung in many New England houses, eyes which followed you everywhere you went in the room.
How small and insignificant he felt in their presence. His sword arm was a passable thing, but hardly the stuff of legend. And his own particular psi talent was a cringe in the face of so many of the others' accomplishments--Booker's laborious achievement in controlled pyrokinesis was almost an art in itself, and Takara, well, some of the things he had seen her do went without explanation, almost without description. Alek was not so colorful as all that and he seriously doubted he would ever accomplish anything so illustrious as to win him a tapestry out of which he might silently weigh another.
The promenade took him to the foot of the raised altar, and there he began to climb the altar stairwell, his dread momentarily blotted out by the wonder and reverence he never failed to feel here. >From a distance the altar bore the illusion of a meandering honeycomb. Close up, however, it was a leviathan. He had to squint and crane his neck all the way back to take in the more than eleven thousand vampire skulls fitted abstractly together, as if with a gifted child's artistry of architecture: sunken, irregular cavities and cultured pyramids, in some places a thin attempt at geometry, at others tight, unteetering towers. But the configuration of the Coven altars were not important; only that they exist to hold the remains of all these deviants. The golgotha's vastness invariably dwarfed even the greatest of slayers into humbleness as they approached her. But New York was an old city, his Coven one of the first of the Vatican's New World Foundings. There had been time for this grand creation, he reminded himself.
On the little altar table he lit a votive candle, felt its small, uncertain warmth grow on his face and hands. Most slayers pilgrimaged little, preferring to harvest and amass their offerings to the golgotha. But he was not most slayers. The impressions the others gained from the harvests were only a vague dream of things, a nagging they forgot within moments of the slay. He worked the skull from the sack and peeled away the residual flakes of skin and stubborn straw-dry strands of hair still clinging to it. And with it in hand he filled a cavity between two tiny childlike skulls. Then he stepped back, scrubbing his hands on the breast of his coat. The impression this time was ugly. He saw curious things--skeletal men and women dancing, their limbs jerked by wires like some kind of marionette-like torture while a mountainous landslide of blood flowed like paint in the background and covered everything in a simmering Pompeii-inspired burial. The last thought to flicker through Empirius's mind before the final darkness took him. A memory or rumination.
Alek shivered, cowering from the feeling, and regarded the altar instead of the image, her aged splendor. Thousands of empty eyes containing almost half of a millennium of darkness stared sightlessly back at him. Innumerable lifetimes. History. He had a fantasy of himself sliding down through a pair of those eyes, of becoming the leviathan itself, and then being slain by the sword wielded by his own hand.
"Shit," he whispered, "no more Vermouth for you, old man."
He shivered once more, but helplessly this time. He'd feared the altar once, the way a child would. But then Amadeus, ever patient and curious of his child's mind, his fears, had taken him before her one day, his voice soft and wise in Alek's ear. Fear her, my acolyte? Why she is the symbol of our great Covenant with the children of men, that the horror and slaughter of our brethren during the Crusades shall not be repeated. The altar--do you see?--is that supplication, the tower who crawls ever upward together with her sisters all over the skin of this world, working towards that final pinnacle where one day at last the glorious face of Peter's church will not be denied us and absolution for our many heinous sins will be ours
Are you now so afraid of her, my best child?
He never feared her again after that, only what she contained. He'd never feared anything, if he wanted to be honest with himself, except the Father's disappointment. He'd read the books of the Covenant and he had taken upon himself its bitter truth and its ordinance and priestly vows of celibacy and obedience. A good student, he memorized every word of the diatribe and fought the secularism which had threatened the core of the Coven in the early seventies. Faith had been lost, and found. But some things, like ceremony, preserved. Many slayers said the New York City Coven was old-fashioned, its Covenmaster too static to push his acolytes through the tribulations of the new millennium--and yet their enclave was more successful statistically than all of the Covens in all of the states put together. So perhaps there was something to be said for being old-fashioned.
He genuflected, once, briefly, and sent up a short prayer for Empirius's soul, then turned and descended the steps to the nave.
And there he stopped.
Father Amadeus sat in the shadows at the head of the Coventable, his hands pinnacled under his chin, his eyes cast downward upon an ancient jade chessboard crowded with tiny figures shaped in silver or bronze as animals. Horses for knights and mice for pawns. The kings and queens were cats with sparkling amber eyes. They'd played such games in the past, he and the Father, yet never with this antiquated set. For a moment the little board intrigued Alek, frightened him, and stopped his concentration.
The Father looked up as Alek approached. His appearance was that of a man of thirty-three or -five, the same as Alek. Yet his face and hands and his flood of wintry hair was bleached to the whiteness of bone, his unevolved skin almost translucent over a vast blue webwork of veins and arteries that contrasted like marble against the blackness of his habit. So much so, in fact, that most of him seemed suspended in the dark, ephemeral, unnatural. And old. He lifted his pale lapis blue eyes and Alek felt the mental tug binding his thoughts to something far vaster, far older than his own mind.
These are bad times, Amadeus said.
In deference Alek remained where he was. He frowned. Yes, there was something wrong, terribly, horribly wrong. This silence, the chessboard with its unfamiliar army--
"Peace," said Amadeus. His silk habit shivered as though alive as he rose from his seat. Standing now as he was, no creature that Alek knew, including himself, could help but be awed by the Covenmaster's presence, his erect, aristocratic form rising like a statue of stone and obsidian from the floor, immovable, fearful in its Giovanni-touched beauty. Alek frowned, his mind engaged in memory and loss so deep and profound he found he had to cast about for a suitable reason. Finding none, he finally fixed on the disappointment of the Braxton show earlier that evening.
The Covenmaster moved toward him with hypnotic grace and touched the back of his long clawlike fingers to Alek's cheek, dispelling those thoughts. The feeling was ash, a freezing burn that emanated like an aura of light from the tips of Amadeus's fingers. Alek found it impossible to turn away, frozen as he was in the glare of those silver eyes, the glitter of such bone-hard fingernails on his flesh. Amadeus smiled knowingly and Alek felt the blood rush to his face, his heart pounding in his ears with a foreign rhythm that he realized after a moment was mimicking that of his master.
"Beautiful," the Covenmaster said as his misshapen talons whisked across Alek's cheek. Then he dropped his hand. Alek managed to turn away, mortified by the simple word, and instead fixed his attention on his master's back as Amadeus went to the edge of the nave and began lowering the rutted wagon wheel chandelier on its rusted orange chain. It fell in painfully rusted increments until it hung like a wreath before the altar. And now, free of enchantment, Alek couldn't help but wonder where that wagon wheel had roamed, what lands it might have covered before it had come to reside here. How had it come to be here, of all places?
"Questions. Always questions," Amadeus answered his thoughts. He produced a tinder wand and rasped it against a bedrock wall. "Like Socrates, Alek, the gadfly, the flea in the ear of the magistrates. It is both your blessing and your curse. To thirst for knowledge is like to open oneself up for the addiction of blood." It wasn't quite a reprimand; the Father's voice was too amused for that. He lit the candles in the black brassy arms of the wheel, a quick certain touch of the wand like a dishonest kiss, turning the wheel as he worked. Those hands--they were like birds in a ritualistic dance, and Alek found it nearly impossible to believe that this man, Amadeus, the teacher to so many slayers, had never seen a day in his whole long life.
"Something's wrong," Alek said. "Something is wrong. You've summoned me. Why?"
"The others--they have told you this?"
"Yes, but--"
"You knew before that. You always know, nein?" Amadeus's wand guttered to white smoke. He dropped it to the Coventable. He swayed like a white medusa toward Alek, stopped only when they were eye to eye, their shoulders nearly touching. Some great sorrow clung to the man like a rank aura.
What must they look like? Alek wondered. Two versions of the same man, perhaps, but that one mirrored the other negatively. And that other younger and darker and less perfect one? His thoughts enfeebled by a nameless terror clinging to the inside of his mind like the bats to the walls of this abbey. Two men who were so alike and yet so unforgivably separated for the moment. Alek reached, imperfect mind and imperfect soul, for the cloister he knew so intimately and found only a somber place unpeopled by memories. For a moment he panicked in his isolation. Never had it been like this between them, never--
"Father?" Alek ventured. "What's wrong?"
"You were always my best disciple."
The thought made Alek want to collapse, vomiting. He wanted to ask more questions, demand answers and reassurances, but he felt Amadeus's hands again on his face, seeing it more completely now, melting to the flesh and form so that they were like two marble statues seeking reconnection. Those long skilled hands moved slowly over his cheekbones and down into the hollowed valleys of his cheeks, fluttered over his lids and eyelashes so gently he did not blink or turn away. "Alek. My Alek," Amadeus said. "My beautiful eternal one. My magnum opus."
Usually he loved to hear his name on Amadeus's tongue, the harsh tenderness of it, the way the Father's Old World accent accentuated the last syllable and carried the hard last letter down into a click. But not like this. Not with weariness. Not with regret. He did not want to be called a magnum opus as though he were a finale of sorts.
Alek closed his eyes as Amadeus's mind brushed lightly, deftly, against his own. This was old magic. As a child he'd lain across the Father's lap after their exhaustive daily sparring matches, and with his brow slicked with diamond sweat, Amadeus had touched him like this, seeming to worship his face and the sharpness that had come into it too quickly in his youth. Alek had felt the old Covenmaster's mind then, those terrible first needling which had ached hours afterward, making his mind a swollen cavity filled with the things of Amadeus. But after so many years they were old links now, moving inside each other with all the deftness of ancient lovers.
I speak to you now of secrets.
Father?
Of dark things. Dark times. We must prepare. I shall not be with you much longer, my most beloved.
Alek's heart fluttered against his ribs like a frantic bird battering itself senseless against the iron bars of its cage. For a desperate moment he tried to break the link, to turn away his mind so the Covenmaster would not see his childlike sorrow, but inside this strange private world there were no doors so easy to find. He was trapped, ashamed.
Peace. I have had a vision...
But Alek's mind broke down into a helpless confusion and he felt Amadeus pull back in response, unable to settle in that sudden hornet's nest of fear. Alek blinked against his stinging eyes, pulled away physically and mentally from his master's touch. "I don't understand. What's going on? What are you saying?"
Amadeus shrugged, the gesture horrid, accepting. "You can do nothing to stop this now, nothing at all. I have seen the things to come and they will not be thwarted. The curse of the Seer. It was said in the old world that the Cyclopses of ancient Athens traded one of their eyes to see the future, but the gods cheated them and all they saw were the time of their own deaths--"
"Goddamnit, don't tell me stories!" Alek said angrily, leaning against the table. "Just tell me what you saw!"
The Father's dead white eyes floated upward to a point just beyond Alek, as if he was seeing a vision being played out on the pale body of the golgotha. "I saw as always I do in visions: I walked in a familiar place I did not know the name of. I saw--light and shadows and animals weeping in their cages and music and heat and blackened crimson. And I saw a figure in black, his eyes wild with the bloodlust. And then a midnight sun rose upon my eye, deadly in its brilliance, and I did not know another day. I knew only the dark that is alien to us all."
Alek shook his head. Amadeus spoke of death. "I...I don't understand."
"Nor do I. But when has that mattered to prophecy?" And with that he simply returned to the table and his seat and his game. Just like that. Fertig. The end.
But no. This, all of this, was stupid. They were immortal, or nearly so. They were chosen by some dark hand of fate to watch from the accursed circle of their kind as the earth devoured the sons and daughters of Eve all around them. Friends, family--time took them all and left behind only cavities. While they, the spawn of the Lilith, went on and on without respite into the deep, uncertain tunnel of the future. And Father Amadeus, who had fought perhaps longer than any of them, would be there among them, for them. Amadeus was always there. He had to be. If he was not, Alek and the rest of the converted vampires would probably all go mad without his direction.
Amadeus's hand rested atop a little silver horse. "If only that were so, my beloved. If only I could be at one with my brethren forever. But I know now that the map of my life has been marked. I have been selected to pursue the greatest mystery of all."
Alek wanted to scream at the bullshit of all this metaphysical hocus-pocus and noble double-talk. Death was death. And death without absolution was damnation. The Father was wrong. Wrong. Because if Amadeus was to die, it meant that his head was going to be taken. And nothing had the power to take him unaware, no human, no vampire--
But a Judas?
Amadeus glanced up as if hearing the thought.
Alek felt an urge to go over to him. Instead he went to the other side of the board and looked more closely at the little animals. His mind was numb.
"Perhaps," said Amadeus, moving the horse forward, "Someone among us this day may be a Judas." He shook his head. "Strange, but the face is not known to me. There is a curious force afoot, Alek. It hides it from me. My path is chosen, that is all I can say."
Alek shuddered. Was he a fool to feel this? He was no longer a child, he did not want to fear like one, and yet he was. As afraid as an orphan child. How old they were, he thought, and yet how young they remained.
"We have a young one to welcome tomorrow," he heard Amadeus whisper. "A promising kinetic. Intriguing. His name is Sean Stone and I want you with him. Watch him. Your eyes will be mine. I have informed him that he will be apprenticed to you," Amadeus looked up, "for the experience."
Alek toyed with the hilt of his sword, running his fingers up and down the engravings. "Is he some kind of agent?" Suddenly it was all too obvious. A new recruit--some sniper from one of the more liberal hives--let him walk into the trap of his own free will. One false step and he would be prey. If he raked a hand over the altar, Alek could find the heated presence of over a dozen assassins executed in the last twenty-some-odd years by his hand. And now perhaps it was this one's turn to join the altar he was supposedly helping to build.
"I must know for certain," Amadeus explained, abandoning the game a second time, this time to sit back and nod solemnly. "We are, after all, something of a dying breed, are we not?"
He nodded obediently.
"Now, I must know: will you do this for me, mein Sohn?"
"You know I will."
"Very good." With the slightest ghost of a smile, Amadeus stood and put his thumb under Alek's chin, urged his face up to the level of his blind gaze. He smile grew both in sorrow and wonder, as if, like his acolyte's reverence for his master, so was the master's for his acolyte. No, but that was impossible. Nothing so great as Amadeus could look upon anything else and not feel as close to omnipotence as an earthbound god. "Now, no more ruminations on grief, child. I must know if you are prepared to take my place in the event that you are needed. I have to know if you will be strong for me."
The spit dried in Alek's mouth and for a moment he could do nothing but stare numb and disconnected at his master's narrow, questing gaze. Covenmaster. He shook his head slowly as feelings--mostly utter raw bone-vibrating terror--began to filter back into the byways of his body. "Father," he stuttered, "Father, you--you said this was many years off, if at all, you said--
"We don't have many years anymore, Alek. Are you ready?"
"I--I don't know, this--it's so sudden."
"You know."
"I would try, Father, you know that, but--"
"You must. Close your eyes. Come into the dark with me. Into our secret place."
What he was asking now, not just duty, but communion, the sharing of souls that was so like lovemaking, yet so alien to it too, so much more than it, was overwhelming. All of it, overwhelming. So much so, that instead of falling into the old rhythms they had laid down decades earlier, Alek simply stood there, stunned and swaying, hanging in a place where there was no will, no decisions, no self...
And in that place the Father came to him quietly, his hands falling like ashes upon his acolyte's shoulders. Amadeus pulled him close, so close they breathed nearly as one and whispered the words of the communion into his mind: Blessed are they who come to my table and partake of my supper. Blessed be...
No, the Father's vision was wrong. Everything was fucking wrong suddenly. He was here to leave his offering and play a friendly game of chess with his teacher, not learn of his demise, not be told he was next in line for this horrendous responsibility. Covenmaster. When had the world gone so horribly wrong?
But then Amadeus smiled as sadly as an angel and held him for he was quite incapable of standing on his own and stroked his acolyte's cheek, murmuring the soft scalding terms of endearment that had so comforted Alek as a child. Amadeus kissed him as though to savor him, long and lingering, drinking his acolyte in with his mouth, taking the salt from his cheeks, the fear from his words, offering only the breath of comfort on his face, his throat.
At the little place behind his ear Alek felt the tips of a delicate set of teeth graze his skin. He shuddered, thinking of how a big cat breaks the neck of its prey, yet his shudder of expectation did nothing to slake the Father's desire, nor did he want it to. It had been so long. Alek closed his eyes and held on and remembered how awkward he'd felt when Amadeus had first offered him this thing. Twelve, he'd just turned twelve, yes, and it had been the first time in their daily sparring bouts that he had met every deft move of Amadeus's sword with his own. They had come together corps a corps that day, in utter symmetricism, a single entity dueling against its doppleganger. And Amadeus, himself breathless, cheeks ruddy with the raw blood of exaltation, declared Alek ripe for that privilege the Covenmaster offered only his most beloved and devout student.
And with those words he'd urged his best student to lie back helplessly on the Coventable. Alek had complied at once. Why shouldn't he? What had he to fear from the man who had saved his soul? The man he loved, the man he desired more than anything real or imagined that the world could offer him. And then came the touch of the master's mouth on his cheek, the delicate prick of a kiss under his chin. He remembered sweating in sudden panic, wary of those teeth and this passion and fearful that their relationship would change somehow and Amadeus would not seem the same to him afterward.
And yet once more the Father had shown patience with him, his touch deft and kind and passionate and fatherly. He'd been so foolish in his dread, Alek supposed, to fear a little innocent communion, the mingling of blood, and with it, minds. But the scars of his childhood had still been raw, in some places, still bleeding. Their relationship had changed after that, yes, had gone fathoms deeper, become a separate entity it almost seemed, as if they had breathed a living soul into it.
Amadeus held him down against the table, kissed the familiar mark in the hollow of Alek's throat, rasped it open with his sharp catlike tongue. Alek caught his breath and shivered, felt the Father's hand drift over his hammering heart as if he would catch the bird in its cage and calm it. "My beloved," Amadeus sighed, his tongue like cut glass against the wound. "More than anything ever before, more than anything will ever again be mine. My blood. My soul. My beloved." And now those teeth, primitive and long and deadly as sin, were in his acolyte's vein, and with every throb of Alek's rapidly beating heart, he could feel his master drinking, drawing nourishment from this chalice he knew so well, drawing life itself, and he found quite unexpectedly that he did not care that it might be killing him. At that moment life seemed nothing but a barrier standing between himself and the ultimate knowledge.
He reached out blindly and sent a cotillion of little animals scattering across the Abbey floor. He clasped something enormous and sweet and suffocating above him and held to it with both hands. His eyes were half-masted, running over, seeing the light of the candlelit wheel grow brighter with each passing, beating, bloodred moment, the supernova of heat branding his face like the tearfully white fury of the noontime sun in a summer sky in a land he knew not the name of while seeing with eyes that were not his own.
Amadeus. He must hold to Amadeus for whatever time they had now. He groaned inwardly. He wanted to die for Amadeus. He wanted to mourn for all they had, all they would never have, the lessons, the tomes of wisdoms, the words spoken inside their minds and out. On the midnight of his fourteenth birthday Amadeus had taken him to his first opera and made him sit unsquirming until it was over and he was in love with the Bohemian foreverafter. Then afterward, they'd gone to the country and found and bled a rabbit in an act of passion that Alek had thought never to share with his master. We are all of two minds, said the Father that night with absolute wisdom. Remember your lessons; they are the clay of your soul.
We are all of two minds.
Two minds...
Amadeus drew back, his tongue skating his bloodstained teeth as if to savor this gift. But it only made Alek feel sad and small. Of all the wards in the world that Amadeus had raised up in the Coven, the men and women, the eternal beings with their eyes full of holy fire, why him? Why was he special?
You were always in my dreams. I loved you before the founding of the Earth. I shall love you always.
"Always..." Alek echoed and watched in awe as the Father skated one long glasslike fingernail down over his own unscathed whiteness of throat, an invitation and a summoning. Take this and drink. For it is the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. Do this in memory of me, my love.
He dwelled in darkness as he rose up and kissed his master in sadness and reverence, even as that kiss deepened into blood and ceremony. He cleaved to darkness, a blind man, because in the dark he and Amadeus could be the same.