"Bout time, man," called a bored Bronx voice when Alek stepped into the studio some minutes before ten, Vincent shooting between his legs like a beast afire. The voice came from a street-smeared blonde figure draped all over his futon and reading his latest issue of The New Yorker, a hand trailing on the floor.
Alek slammed the alleyside door and eyed this pretentious stranger stupid enough to break into a slayer's apartment. Were he among the more impulsive of his kind, the hood would be eviscerated and sitting on the floor in a puddle of his own gore right about now. Lucky for the stranger, Alek preferred explanations first. He checked the door's many locks, but none of them looked jimmied or otherwise tampered with. He returned his narrow-eyed attention to the stranger. "Who the hell are you and how the hell did you get in here?"
The stranger, a child really, peered up, eyes slanting dubiously. There were hard and metallic, those eyes, and around them the sculpture of the boy's face was like a Michelangelo angel with a particularly nasty turn of mind, cherubic and yet seemingly too wise. One narrow pale eyebrow arched evilly. He looked to the open industrial window facing out over the alley and tapped his temple with a forefinger, grinned, giggled, showing a mouthful of heartlessly perfect teeth he'd filed to absurd points.
Well, that just about left no question as to who or how. Alek let out his breath and relaxed his light instinctive battle stance--but only a little. He estimated the child to be sixteen, certainly no more than eighteen, and tried hard not to hate him too completely. Only a whelp in the Coven, like Eustace. A psychokinetic--and probably psychotic--result of crossed genetic codes that had no business meeting at all. It wasn't his place to judge, but something about the kid made the hair want to stand on the back of his neck.
Alek clenched his fist, let it go, looked around his studio. The centerfold art of all his New Yorkers had been torn brutally from their spines and lay scattered across the width of the studio as if a tornado had passed none too subtly through the alleywide space here. Alek watched with a dry mouth as Sean delicately stripped the copy he held of its Andrew Wyeth.
Alek closed his eyes and swallowed hard. He let it go.
"Rip it up, man. Shred it gooood..."
Alek opened his eyes. "What?"
Sean's face sharpened wolfishly, a gem of saliva glittering with obscene brightness at the corner of his grinning mouth. He laughed. "Ain't you never heard no bitchin' rap before, man? When you from, man?"
Alek dropped the coat off his shoulders, shivered as though he were completely naked now. "1953," he answered the whelp. "And I'm afraid I'm not much into the moderns, Mr. Stone."
"Stone Man to you," Sean corrected him. Then he mellowed out all of a sudden. He laughed, eyed the stereo at the far end of the studio and the riffled collection of records on the table beside it. "Man," came the Stone Man's voice like a javelin, "who the fuck is Joe Jackson?"
Alek shuddered, let it go, thankful he kept his real audio treasures--vintage original Blue Oyster Cult vinyls and Paranoid and Deepest Purple--under the bed. He went to the closet and fished loose his leather greatcoat and sword, briefly considered using the weapon on the stupid, unlearned little bastard, then thought better of it. It would only make a mess of the studio. "No one you'd keep company with," he said.
Sean watched him with feline eyes. "Man, what is it you do here?"
Alek hooked a scarf around his neck, jerked it tight. "Do?" He turned around. "I sleep here. I eat here. I paint here. I do the things you do in a studio apartment."
Sean yawned theatrically. "Father said you got an `old soul' or sumpin', so I guess you're like older than fucking dirt. Probably were here back when the fuckin' Redcoats landed, right?" When he received no reply to that assumption, he shifted his weight and put his dirty unlaced sneakered feet up on the glass coffee table next to an ancient veined Han jade amphora, something Alek's old boss at the museum had given him as a going-away gift when he quit to paint for Braxton. Alek held his breath, but the amphora stayed intact for the moment. "So you do, like, what? McFarlane stuff?"
"Excuse me?"
Sean rolled his eyes ceilingward. "You know, man, Todd McFarlane. You do comics or what?"
Alek pointed to the oil over the futon, a surreal Neolithic piece that had made the cover of Le Jour in Brussels two years ago and had gotten him that Braxton grant he'd very soon be bereft of if he didn't come up with something salable pretty soon.
"Yours?" the Stone Man asked.
"Yes."
Sean studied it thoroughly a moment. "You in counseling for this, man, or what?" he asked.
Alek slammed the closet door, a crack like a jagged hair magically appearing along the plankwood. "I would very much hate to interfere with your methodical trashing of my home and life, Mr. Stone, but are you ready?"
Sean grinned, pulled himself up with enormous ceremony. Like so many lanky young kids, he looked taller and more impressive on his feet: nearly six feet of squealing paten leather, jangling zippers and blinding moon-white metals. Delicate chains grew mystically from Sean's earlobes and disappeared up his nostrils. His eyes looked to be smeared with lipstick. As he moved, his coat slit open like a skin to reveal a wide link of bronzed trophy teeth hanging to the dead center of his dirty black T-shirt. Alek was almost ready to bet something antisocial would be suggested on that shirt, EAT THE DOG AND BEAT YOUR MOTHER or something to that effect, but in the end it was only an unimaginative Grateful Dead Reunion concert logo. Sean's mouth twisted into a sneering grin. "Smokin', man. Let's...get...it...on!" He narrowed his eyes to glittering black slashes, pinning Alek like a park punk thinking to roll some homeless sot.
Alek blinked and automatically threw up a thin impromptu field of mental protection as he felt something build in the room between them, something like the sizzling legendary forewave supposedly felt by the victim before the strike of lightning. No good. A desert-hot ghostly hand brushed past his cheek and punched the dust shield of the Neolithic on the wall, sending two crazed zigzags through the Plexiglas that looked suspiciously like a couple of backward Z's. Initials?
"Shit, man, did I do that?" Sean laughed a high, cackling laugh. The sound of it hinted at some soft, padded room in a high-end mental asylum for the criminally insane that was positively lurking in the kid's near-future.
Seething, Alek ripped the scarf on his shoulders away, lest it become an impromptu noose. Oh, he prayed, for a chance to escort the kid to Greystone himself. He remembered the prophecy and then reconsidered the possibility of it ever coming to that, if the whelp wouldn't be destroyed long before. By his hand or by another's.
Running a hand through his hair and down over his face, washing away all his suspicions for the moment, he went to the alleyside door. "Let's. Go. Stone," he said, holding the door open for his young charge.
Sean stopped laughing and smiled quick and easy like a teenager being told he had full run of the world and had every intention of running it like an amusement park with free rides. "Yes, massah. Whatever you want, massah..." he said, skipping ahead of his teacher and out into the night, nimbly, like a summoned strigoi or dancing demon loosened from a pit out of some remote corner of Dante's legendary hell.
Club Bauhaus, like so many other exclusive demimonde of private pleasure clubs, was located a few miles from SoHo, in the middle of one of New York's older, shabbier Bohemian communities. The cab the two slayers had taken landed curbside to the nightspot just shy of ten-thirty. The Coptic Egyptian cabby looked none too thrilled to be cruising these outlaw streets at this hour. Alek gave him an extra ten for his trouble and ushered him along with an old traditional Cairo parting gesture, the tips of the fingers peaked at the brow and a slight stiff bow to signify the blessing of the Eye of Horus, protector of travelers far from home.
"Fuck me," Sean said, loping after Alek over the broken walk, "You old as shit itself, ain't you?"
"Forty-eight, actually," Alek answered distractedly as he strolled toward the looming black mass of battered brownstone at the end of this half-forgotten dead-end street.
"Hundred?" the whelp sneered.
"Years," Alek said, stopping where a pile of ancient reeking garbage crouched in the curb and a length of dirty police line dragged in the gutter like a mark of demarcation. He looked up, past the rat-infested grime, and took in the sight of the club.
Originally an abandoned warehouse, the building had been converted into a disco by several young ambitious capitalists a decade and a half earlier. But when that craze had died, so did the club. It passed through several hands and incarnations before being bought by the present owner, Jean Paul, a Paris-born vampire with an indelible taste for real estate. After several months of interior redesigning, the dive had reopened with a new name and a new attitude. Converted into a goth-punk haven with live music, a dance loft and an exclusive "Members Only" lower level for those humans with more exotic tastes in entertainment, the club had quickly developed into the hottest place in the Lower East Side to hang out in and be seen.
As usual, a crowd of impatient patrons waited anxiously on the sidewalk outside. Most were wealthy, thirtysomething businessmen in fifteen-hundred-dollar lounge suits with young women in designer dresses and stiletto heels on their arms. The club catered to mistresses, not wives. Morals and convention were checked at the door.
Crowding them for space were the goths and Generation X-ers with a great deal less money or hope. But just the same, here they were seeking a path and an escape in the club from what they saw as the rigors of Church and Government and whatever other institutions they presently felt were cheating them of life and pleasure. Their look was a mix of black leather and faded denim, Victorian finery and post-grunge regalia. Jewelry and makeup was cheap and slathered on in excess like a masquerade behind which these disillusioned children of the night might hide their true faces.
In many ways, Alek found himself sympathizing with the younger generation. Most were bright and sensitive young people trying desperately to cope with a world that had learned to hate its youth. Lonely and disillusioned, they had created a whole subculture not unlike the renegade youth of the sixties and seventies he was familiar with. But unlike those lost souls Alek had once known, these young people were basing their rebellion and inner culture on decadence and death and the overdramatized plights of the vampires they shared their world with. Their view of vampirism came from erotic novels and cheap B films, not the real thing. As he edged through their numbers, he uttered a silent prayer that they remain forever ignorant of the truth.
A three-hundred pound vampire nicknamed Erebus guarded the entrance to the club as jealously as the hell hound he was named by his hive for. Dressed entirely in black, Erebus exuded an air of barely-restrained menace and arbitrarily controlled all admissions to the club. His word was law. Bribes meant nothing to him, nor did social standing or the flash of a badge.
Alek nodded at the doorman. The vampire crossed his arms--they were as thick around as Alek's thigh--and grimaced with a mouthful of sharply filed teeth as he took in the slayer's long hair and coat. So brave, and yet his eyes registered threat almost at once when he realized who it was. His smile fell, perhaps as he remembered his painfully close shave five years earlier. "Jean Paul ain't expecting you, man," Erebus boomed cautiously in his carrying bass rumble.
"Then announce me," Alek said.
"You got an awful lotta fuckin' balls comin' round here."
"That's not all I have," Alek said, lifting his coat aside for a split-second.
Erebus stepped back hastily, holding the door open for Alek and his charge with all the spirit of a true gentleman. He and Sean swayed wordlessly through the door and into the club.
Alek paused, letting his eyes change to accommodate the dim interior. The spare blacklighting and the swirls of tobacco and clove smoke made it difficult to see. The ever-present pound of industrial heavy metal played at the very threshold of pain made conversation impossible. Sean's whoop of bright-eyed excitement was silent in the hot, deafening roar of sound. For a moment it seemed possible that the whelp was simply going to shoot right into the mass of patrons and disappear. Alek caught him by the collar. Wait, he mouthed sternly to the kid. Sean's dazzling silver eyes narrowed. He looked about to protest. Sit, said Alek and pushed the kid into an empty seat.
Nobody noticed them. Nobody cared. The goths, the norms and those somewhere in between crowded the dance loft above and the promenade below as busy as insects crawling over a corpse. They moved frenetically to the eardrum-splitting rhythms of the house band, a quartet of body-pierced, tattooed delinquents who were either vampires themselves or were just keyed up enough on junk to have a similar predatory look in their eyes. Alek cared neither way; he wasn't here to talk to the musicians.
Accompanied by a backbeat that wouldn't quit, Alek descended the narrow stairway leading to the basement, his nerve-endings afire at this level. At the bottom of the landing stood another figure beside an ornately carved door marked Members Only. Here was Mako, a small, slender male with near-mahogany skin and greased hair and too-wide of a smile. Though he looked no more exotic than an eighteen-year-old Asian-African mix, he was closer to a thousand. And a Moor. He loved cops no more than Erebus, but like the gatekeeper, he was wise enough not to court an affront with a slayer.
"Jean Paul in?" Alek asked the vampire conversationally.
Mako blinked, white eyes flashing in his dark face as he took in the sight before him. A slayer. And he was asking if his boss was in tonight. Normally, the members of the hive were obligated to defend their master to the death from possible harm. But in this case, Mako had decided that discretion was indeed the better part of valor. "Sure," he said. "Yeah. When's he not?" Then "But he ain't havin' guests tonight," the Moor added in his newly-acquired tough-guy Brooklyn slur as if for some last ditch effort at bravery.
"I'm not a guest," Alek said, brushing past him, "I'm the Coven. Remember?"
There were a dozen cocktail tables scattered about the private chamber of the master of the hive, with perhaps a dozen vampires and twice that many human whores and lackeys present. A bar and barkeep furnished the humans with wine and brandies and the vampires with bottles of some of the finest imported and domestic animal blood in the world. To the rear of the room, upon a small raised dais, was the entertainment for the night, the living crucifixion of a young girl by a small rat-faced vampire dressed all in black Reaper robes. For a moment, Alek was certain he would have to call a housecleaning; then, studying her more closely, he realized the girl being tortured was really a small slim woman dressed all in Alice in Wonderland frills, not a minor, and certainly not human. Gabriella, Jean Paul's favorite. He recognized her now, her lewd prettiness. Shrugging, he turned his attention instead on the patronage, and in particular, the tall aristocratic man in the white suit and red tie strolling toward him, brass-headed cane in hand.
Jean Paul. He had the disarming, boyish looks of the young-old Richard Geere and the fashion sense of a true Parisian--and was well-known in many circles to use both of them to his full advantage in business as well as pleasure. "Quite the appetite-whetter, is it not?" Jean Paul asked, indicating the bleeding body of his mate on the cross. As always, the hivemaster's approach was direct, no quarter given, like a man with nothing at all to hide.
"I wouldn't know," Alek answered Jean Paul, looking away from the display. He was conscious of breathing through his mouth since the start, a reflexive action to keep the scent of blood from making him sluggish. An old trick of Amadeus's.
Jean Paul lowered his eyes seductively. "A necessary evil, you understand."
"How so?"
"Have you yet tasted the vintage, monsieur?" His hand snapping out, he snagged a cocktail glass on a waiter's tray in passing and offered the elixir to Alek.
Alek let out his breath and automatically regretted it. The stuff smelled disgusting, flat and lifeless and harshly metallic. "Hart?" Alek asked as his Jacobson's organ was assailed by the abusive odor of the stuff.
"The most repulsive substance in the world, next to cow's blood," Jean Paul said, taking a sip and making a face. "'Tis shame it is as nutritious as it is. I'd much prefer to tear out the throats of the poor creature's murderers. But until the day the Coven is no more, we endure." Jean Paul nodded toward the dais as he escorted them both to a table near the back, "And we do the best we can to summon our desire," he added with a smile that baited Alek's response.
Alek refused to rise to the argument tonight. He sat and took in the performance instead. All or most of Jean Paul's subjects were painfreaks, and yet this was his typical display of guilty innocence at work. Many of the vampires, including the late Empirius, would--and did--scoff at the Parisian's incessant propriety and strict attention to law. It was almost a caricature, as if Jean Paul believed that good behavior would gain him a privilege or three. Not that it would not. Alek had known the vampire since he opened the club in the early nineties, and though no unexpected deaths had turned up in or around Club Bauhaus, nothing existed to say that the Frenchman was not a hunter in some other remote and shadowy corner of the city. If he wanted to, Alek would have had no trouble finding out; he knew souls out of every walk of life in this city, from Chinatown all the way up the peninsula to the Long Island Sound. But why press for the slaying of an all-but-model vampire citizen?
"Your `desire' is being contained within these walls, is it not, my friend?" Alek asked as he glanced askance at Gabriella's bloody, sensual display. Of course, what Jean Paul's subjects did in the privacy of their own circle was entirely their own business. Alek had seen enough in other clubs, both hive and human, to consider this a regular kindergarten class.
Jean Paul sat back in his seat, the back of his chair characteristically to the bricks like Wild Bill Hickok obsessed with being taken from behind. His eyes lowered, this time not in seduction but in subdued surprise. "Why, have you heard otherwise, monsieur?"
Alek smiled. "No. But if you had answered any other way, Jean Paul, I would have started to worry."
The Frenchman relaxed. "So your most welcome visit is strictly friendly?"
"Actually, I was wondering if you knew of any new bleeding-heart liberals."
"You mean--"
"I mean Normans."
Jean Paul let out his breath and closed his eyes. Raising a hand, he held up two fingers for a human waiter to see. 1982. His favorite vintage. The year he slew the hivemaster Antony and claimed the dead vampire's harem queen as his own. Gabriella had been bound to him ever since. "You are subtle, my friend, aren't you?"
"I don't have time for subtleties, Jean Paul. Don't ask me why. I just need to know what the word on the street is."
Jean Paul thought long and hard before speaking. One did not simply jabber on about Normans like one would go on about the other confederacies which plagued the city both in the mainstream and the underground. Pro-Norms were probably the most dangerous and influential terrorists the city didn't know it fought. It was there misguided belief that the world was in desperate need of another Inquisition to purge it of the demon-spawn they saw as a major threat to human existence. It was well-known among the Coven and many of the hives that almost half of the marks placed on hivemasters--and Covenmasters--could be traced back to the ancient anti-vampire hate-cult of humans called the Pro-Normals, or Normans. Their eyes and ears were everywhere. And in many ways they were more a threat to hives than the Coven; the Coven, at least, had its honor codes.
They were served the bottle some spare moments later. Alek's eyes strayed incessantly to the performance until at last Jean Paul's incipient whisper brought his attention back around. "There was a demonstration two nights ago, a small one," he said as he poured them both a glass of rabbit's blood. "A few rocks thrown at Erebus, a few self-righteous holy God-thumping threats, nothing more."
"Normans?"
"That or Lutherans." Jean Paul smiled, showing his refined smile of straight, white, perfectly filed teeth. "You know, I can never quite tell which--"
"Shit."
"Excuse me?"
"Shit," Alek repeated, standing up and nearly overturning the table. He closed his eyes and watched inside the picture-show of his mind as Sean drew to the side of the club. And in the oily darkness of the sliver-mooned night he saw the whelp's pale long hands make long swooping strokes over a tapered chrome body. Harley-Davidson fifteen hundred super-charged engine, man. Swan-neck frame. Stove enameled. Methane injection built right into the fucker. Goes to ninety in one-point-five seconds. It'd kill it, but you'd be miles away when it happened. Vrooom! The voice came from a husky biker-type behind him. Cool?
Real cool, man, real fuckin' cool! Sean laughed his high, nervous horse's whinny and the sound of it made Alek's teeth ache. A moment and a blurring silver flicker later, Alek/Sean tasted the metallic sweet-sour tang of spilt blood on the air. The aging biker lay prone on the ground, hands cupped to his throat, but like a sieve, catching none of the steaming crimson red flowing like wine down the front of his white T-shirt.
But he/Sean was unaffected by the bloodletting; he/Sean was too busy slipping one sinewy jeans leg over the saddle of the bike. Can I come? came another voice, a young starry-eyed boy already in love with this beautiful fallen angel who had floored the biker with such fluid violence.
Alek/Sean laughed riotously. The machine snarled. Sean popped the clutch and Alek felt his soul being torn two inches from his body and left to writhe behind as they pounced forward, the bike carrying the whelp and Alek's piggybacked conscious up and over the hills of the city and into the sterile holocaust of midwinter in raw breaths of blue smoke and cooking rubber. From a now spiraling godlike distance, Alek saw the whelp laugh and toss back his head, his lion's mane of jawcut yellow hair becoming a river of molten gold under the greasy, one-eyed ogling of the Martian gooseneck Village lamps. "We are the Children of the Night, man!" he cried as he took a corner at an impossible angle. "Listen to our bitchin' music!" Sean's voice lengthened into a werewolf bay, a ruthless sound caught easily by the wind and swollen into a great dark umbrella over their heads.
Alek's physical body was on the club's roof by that time. Soaring like a bat, he crossed the thirty- and sometimes fifty-foot drops separating the buildings with a single leap, headed on a northeastern-bound flight toward the Atlantic on the psychic tale of his runaway acolyte. Most, but not all, of the buildings in this part of the city were level with the top of the next. He jumped the alleys between the structures with little effort and even less thought, sending off multiple motion detectors on roofs and gables but never slowing or stopping even a moment to catch his breath, cursing himself breathlessly for trusting the little turd, even a moment, to behave himself.
The bike, meanwhile, carried his acolyte deeper into the Eastside underworld of rotted buildings gothic and eyeless with glass, twisted projects and derelict cars, X-rated babylons and Asian groceries too afraid to stay open after dusk when all the monsters came out and too poor not to.
The brainless fool was on the road for almost a quarter of an hour when it happened the first time. Horrorshow, man! Sean bellowed as he reined up his machine at the blinking intersection of Grand and FDR Drive. His hands caressed the ignition and the cycle growled impatiently. His jackal-like mouth slackened open, tongue flicking over his teeth and making them shine like wet little pearls. "Oh yeah, man, oh fuckin' yeah!" he bellowed.
From sixteen blocks away, Alek felt the first stirrings--a dull prickling in his nape and in the small of his back, as if a wire were being thrummed across the length of his spine.
"Yeah, man!" Sean's glassy gaze returned to the road ahead of him, shoulders bunching and flexing, tough, coiled muscle writhing like a nest of snakes under his paten leather hide. He gunned his machine, eyed the alley directly across the street. "There we go, baby, there ...we...go!"
His metal-plated beast screamed.
Howling, Sean peeled out at whiplash speed and rounded a corner into a dead waste of lightless alley space. The Harley's shiny Cyclops's eye splashed over orange clay brick and a gallery of arcane graffiti. Finally it picked out the two figures at the back of the dead end space. A girl, sharp bones scarcely protected by a punk mini and a battered leather jacket, had a junky hanging against the wall. A moment after the light hit her she turned, black painted streetwalker's eyes catching the invasion of light and sending it back like the aquamarine eyes of a Siamese cat.
Her mouth and chin were as scarlet as the flimsy little white dress she wore.
Such a dirty trick, Alek thought as he slid over the cornice edge of a bank building and clambered like a monkey down the fire escape. The lesser evolved of the vampire did not read the new brood the way they did their own. In a vampire's powerful and delicate psyche their younger half-brethren were as blank slates to them as the simple human prey they required to survive. Blank until that final moment of total understanding, when it was far too late for them and escape a fallacy. Alek, like many of the new breed, had learned that with time and stealth enough many need never know they were marked at all. It had often been his method.
But Sean of course was going to be a bastard about it.
He rode his mount to a skittering halt and booted down the kickstand, leapt from the machine like a fair angel of destruction falling to earth. He smiled at his quarry, brandishing his katana like a baton. "Here, kitty, kitty."
The little vampire hissed, showed him her cattish teeth.
"Aww, nice kitty. Nice kitty, kitty." Sean cut her.
The girl fell against the wall like a smashed insect. She growled, eyes flashing up at her slayer like bits of broken glass.
Sean kicked the carcass of her dead john. "Bad kitty. Bad, baaad kitty. Lookit the mess you made!" He sliced her face.
The girl crumpled, hissing in and out of her mouth and the side of her cheek. Sean giggled like a wicked little boy who knows too many secrets and kicked her over, knelt down beside her, licked the john's blood off her mouth. The vampire bit his cheek. Sean swore and bashed her skull against the pocked asphalt floor of the alley. She writhed like an eel. Sean punched her in the cheek. She lay still at last, watching him with her oily, tearless eyes.
"Such a very bad kitty," Sean growled, gasping as if he'd been running ceaselessly for hours. He smiled, licked his teeth like a lion. "Want to share some kitty with me, little girl, hmm?" He drew his sword and sliced the front of her dress open with it. The material hissed apart to reveal bruised ribs and too-thin skin and the heaving chest of a fevering, unbound female. "I'll be the best you ever had..."
Watch him, Amadeus had said. Your eyes will be mine. Yes and watch he had. But he couldn't watch this. Not this--slaughter. Dropping down from the fire escape he was perched on like a raven, Alek zeroed in on the kid.
Sean grinned, looked up, glee fleeing in favor of blatant horror. "Wha the fu--?"
Alek smashed a controlled palm-heel strike into the center of Sean's groin, lifting him up and off the girl and driving him into the darkness beyond. Sean cannonballed into the dead end wall, a geyser of purple blood streaming out of his mouth and nose from a ruptured spleen. He slumped, pale eyes fluttering to rise and meet those of his master's in blatant confusion. Alek snarled, leapt forward like a shadow, and wrenched the sword from his student's idiot grip. With his free hand he covered Sean's face, narrow sharp fingerbones burrowing deep into the soft pouches of flesh under the whelp's puzzled eyes. "You want to fuck someone? Fuck me, you dickless little whelp," he said, shaking the kid like the bag of waste he was and covering him in threads of spittle. "Stupid, shitty punk. Judas. You've learned nothing. You know nothing."
He raised the little shit up. Sean groaned, a long low nasal sound with the vice of bony fingers crushing the cartilage of his nose and sending the blood back into his throat. The whelp's black-lacquered fingernails raked Alek's cheeks, caught like bats in his hair; his legs pedaled uselessly. Alek smiled. So light and flimsy, like a wicker marionette that could be shattered to hopeless splinters within seconds.
Yes.
Amadeus was sure to live forever then.
But he had his vows. He wasn't yet Covenmaster; he didn't yet hold the privilege of judging his brethren. God help Sean if he ever did. Disgusted, he cast the whelp away from him and into a small cluster of trash cans with a noisy splash of dented tin and flat, dervishing lids. Sean whimpered and blinked his disbelieving eyes where he lay among a month's worth of refuse.
Alek flung aside the whelp's sword and turned away, his teeth locked so perfectly together he sampled his own blood in his cheek. He drew his own sword and crouched down over the girl's laboring body. He brushed blonde strands of hair from her face. The beauty under her fear surprised him, made his fingers tremble a little when he put the back of his hand to her ruined cheek. His touch seemed to stop her labored breath, her pain, her panic. He sensed great distance, time and knowledge, high places and low, a locked door...
Her face jumbled and ran like rain. With effort be wrenched his mind away, a mind that so wanted to live inside of others, his vampiric mind. He murmured meaningless words of closure and comfort as he buried his hands in her hair and jerked his sword gently across the exposed bow of her neck. Somehow, another beheading seemed an unnecessary evil.
Her body collapsed with the slightest of murmurings, like a sleeper awakening or only returning to dreams. And in that way, her life bled away.
Sean sat up and screeched thinly, the sound like that of a starved beast robbed of its meat. Alek spun around at once, his sword barring his own throat in defense. But the punk had not even moved out of his position; be only smiled at Alek, glared at the sword lying at Alek's feet.
Alek stamped his foot forward over the sword, but the weapon was being summoned with astonishing mental power; he skated off the steel and went to one knee with a grunt. The sword skipped effortlessly along the ground and into Sean's hand like a pet returning eagerly to its master.
Then the whelp's body shot upward, casting off tin lids like discarded bits of armor. His face writhed as he charged, legs scissoring, shoulders bunching into the precise arc of his swing.
"Don't," Alek said. Sean came anyway. Alek parried the blade in passing, shouldered the dumb shit away from him. Both Sean and his blade clattered to the alley floor.
"Whelp," Alek growled. He stepped in and effortlessly butterflied his katana. Sean's necklace of teeth chittered down and pelted the ground around him like rain. Sean looked up. Fear, he would see now, thought Alek, a silent plea--
But Sean only smiled, laughed. "You're crying, jelly bean," he said. "The mighty Chosen One is crying like a fuckin' baby!" He laughed harder, rolled to his feet, still laughing, laughing. His laughter whined on the concave undersides of the trash can lids, made a noisy coven of crow arrow out of their roost in the city's hidden heights. "You are righteously tipped, man, you know that?" Sean screamed. "Righteously, fuckin' tipped!"
Alek touched the warmth on his face. Tipped. A profanity. Slander. Tipped was Debra, not him. Filth. It was all filth falling from the filthy mouth of a little shit with no judgment and no sense. How he hated Sean, the little Judas, his mouth already sweetened rottenly with the kiss of death.
He stepped in and slapped Sean across the face.
Sean spanked against the brick wall, his laughing face seizing up into a corpselike rictus. One hand tentatively explored the spayed red mark on his face. "You hit me," he said with astonishment. "Tipped motherfucking bastard, I can't believe you hit me! Nobody hits the Stone Man! NOBODY!" His eyes shrank to screws.
Alek stiffened. In his mind he saw a plate-glass dust shield spider, he saw a sword skating along the ground as if drawn by a powerful magnet, he saw, in the boy's mind, a sharp black-pointed pencil streak off a desk and stick like a dart in another boy's left eye. He leapt backwards as he felt Sean's vengeful spirit claw reach for him. He raised his arms and his mind in a shield as it tried to envelope him.
The loosened psi talent hit his barrier and halted. Alek shuddered violently, felt it coil back onto itself. Sean's eyes narrowed to mere threads as he bore down with the unleashed fury of his mind. New brood, thought Alek, newer than even his own generation. And maybe stronger. Alek grunted as he was rocked back against the wall by the crushing weight of the boy's psi. Christ, but he couldn't do this, couldn't hold back this kind of titan force trying to shove him through three feet of bricked wall.
The air shimmered with distortion like heat rising off the deadpan of the desert at high noon. Slender black cracks trickled up the flanks of the derelict tenement building on their left. A window on the third floor burst into diamond rain. A fire escape fastened to a wall like a giant alien insect squealed as its metal bones were methodically reshaped. The soft, dying, warbling bodies of pigeons pelted the ground from the broken clerestory high above them like wadded-up masses of tissue ...
And it was enough.
The idiot. He'd no idea what he'd unleashed. Sean's psi was coupling and expanding between them and before very long even Alek with all his experience would not be able to balance that fireball of power over their heads. He wasn't certain what would. And when he was spent, what then? He could imagine the sphere of psi breaking apart like a glass meteor, sparks of wild energy set free-wheeling into the night to fall like rampaging stars all over the city.
And the brunt of It, the body, falling back on the source, into Sean Stone. In its present state the energy would have the power to punch the heart from his chest and twist his limbs out of their sockets with the ease of an angry child dismembering a doll. Would serve him right, too.
But no such pleasure. The power had to be dealt with, had to. It was Coven law. His law.
Alek closed his eyes. It was always easiest to work in the dark, to see as Amadeus saw. In the dark there were no limitations. The mind's eye was infinite. And with infinite care Alek extended a beckoning finger of his own empathic talent toward the swarm of angry energy. It came eagerly. Alek's finger expanded, became a full talon that cradled the wild globe of loosened energy carefully, almost with reverence.
Then his mind spiraled up, pulling free of the bruised alley. It drifted weightlessly over the cold black sea of the city with its many blinking eyes and patchwork of street-stitchery and its monoliths of glass and of steel and its people wise and ignorant. And there, in that place, invisible and powerful, Alek cast the titan of force deep into space where it would spin and soar and gather momentum for all eternity--
--and he crashed, exhausted, gasping, to his knees. He brought his hands down very slowly, breath hitching, dying in a long hiss of release. Relief.
The new emptiness in the alley felt vast. Christ, what a mess they'd made of it.
Alek pushed himself up using his sword as leverage, He staggered forward unevenly, with all the careful precision of the chronically ill. He was spent. Sick. He headed toward the kneeling figure of his acolyte just ahead.
The whelp moaned, sick as a dog, sick as hell itself.
Alek smiled. Good.
Sean fell forward and Alek caught him.
Teresa waited until the two slayers were long gone before emerging into the bluish neon moonlight pouring in through the shattered clerestory window of the abandoned tenement building she called home. Behind her, the light cast the fallen beams into suggestive crossbones relief. She walked to the edge of the open ledge, her shadow sweeping, ravenlike, along the cluttered floor to meet her like an attentive retinue. She looked down. The alley stank of cardboard and standing water and the aftereffects of the war--wet steel, shed blood. Death. Death most of all. Teresa did not enjoy the smell, not now, when it emanated from the dead body of the unbound female. Already the flesh and bones had begun to decay, she was so old.
Teresa studied the remnants: black leather jacket and white chemise gown, alluring, ancient, intriguing. But it was what the johns the vampire had fed on had seen in her eyes. Survival of the fittest. Adaptation. The coveted philosophies of the Ancients and the modern Darwin. The female had been only a girlish thing, like Teresa herself, but not really. Too old. An antique doll, centuries old and beautifully preserved.
But not now. Not now. Free now.
In too many ways, Teresa was bitterly jealous.
She was dressed still in the garb of the evening before, the dusty leather mini, the jacket with its bloodstained chains. But as though she wore a gown of white and gold, she brushed her fall of ragged long black hair off her shoulders and studied the toothy sliver of the moon overhead. Not full as it ought to be, not full as it had been the night Paris died.
She blinked. She remembered last night trying not to look at the man on the bed at the Marriott, his lifeless body shiny and as ephemeral as snow in the moonlight, the telltale track of her teeth from his crotch to the gaping black hole in his throat. As she had removed the cash from his wallet on the bureau--three or four hundred dollars at a quick count--she had felt a curious pang she could identify only as guilt. But it was a passing thing. It was their way, hers and others, their purpose, their divine will to embrace the cannon of the predator and swallow the weak-minded and the faltering. It was a drama as old as time and the earth.
She'd stuffed the money into her jacket and took his watch as well. She thought she would be able to pawn it at the shop on Jerome for maybe forty or fifty dollars, and every little bit helped her survive here to finish the mission. The wedding band he wore she crushed in her fist and slung into a dark corner. Some things no one deserved to own.
Teresa shifted and the chemicalized city wind shifted with her as she considered the war so recently waged. Survival. War among predators. It was a drama played well in the hearts of the two slayers, the dark one so like a stony embodiment of Hades and the sickly colorless one with the madness and the taint of early death in his blood. Their souls were clear as colored glass to her. The pale one had a spirit as inky as tar. The dark one was red. Red with crimson lines of fire at his fingertips and behind his eyes.
So like...Paris.
Teresa closed her eyes, and in her ragged memory her Paris turned over an iron knife with a papal-cross hilt of black onyx. She felt its weight in her hand, almost expected it to be there for her to hold. She heard her Paris's words, his plea, and she nodded. She remembered the undying love of his lips, his hands, upon her. She remembered her vow.
The promise she had made, and the tall icy soul all in black and white and crimson with the face of his murdered sister: these two things were her destinies, then. Finally. After so many years, it was all beginning to come together. Opening her eyes, she searched for the moon among the black clouds and between the tall stone monoliths, yet the crimson lines of power were impressed on her eyes forever, like the veins of the sun at dusk.