“Danny, what is it?” Kage demanded to know. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s dark here,” cried the boy.
“Yes, Danny. I know. We’re going home soon…”
Alek heard the warning crack in the ceiling in the same moment Kage did, but Kage’s ears virtually pricked in response to it. Kage said, “Get away from the hole, Danny…get away!” He pushed at thin air as if he could force the boy away from danger.
The boy did so, but it was already too late. A portion of the ceiling, weakened by the quake that had demolished the line, lurched and dropped dust and with a grinding growl began to collapse into the tunnel on top of them all. Danny screamed and grabbed at the sides of the crevice as the floor gave way beneath him, the ceiling slanting him down into the rolling slate of debris that filled the tunnel with thunder and an unbreathable cloud of dust. Helpless, he went with it.
It all happened too fast.
Alek moved sideways, narrowly avoiding the falling mountain of rubble, and grabbed Robyn who had suddenly appeared beside him. She began to scream, her voice melding with the roar of the settling ceiling and the cries of her young son. The blindness was like the chaos all about them. Unending and nerve splitting. He pulled his coat over them both and felt the slamming weight of the ceiling as it crushed them both to the floor, he on top of her. Some of the collapse struck him across the shoulders and for a moment he saw a kaleidoscope of lights and found he was floating in a quiet, distant nothing. Then reality began to intrude, and with it the heat and the coughing dust and the remembrance of what had occurred.
He was buried alive and his ribs were on fire. He tried to rise, but he was pinned to the floor. He ran his hands over the space beneath him, but Robyn was gone. Gone. He began to crawl, heading toward the only source of light directly ahead of him. By the time he managed to crawl out from under the debris some several moments later, he saw Robyn had wormed her way out ahead of him. She was on her feet, stunned and disheveled but otherwise okay. She was standing atop the fallen debris and trying to reach Danny where the boy dangled from the ceiling, wrapped like a monkey around a tangle of electrical cords. There he hung, a frightened little monkey dangling over the fifty-foot plunge into the sub line. Kage had not been so lucky. Standing directly beneath the collapse and unwilling to take his eyes off his new master, the whole brunt of the debris had buried him completely.
“Alek!” Robyn made a valiant leap to reach her son, falling short by at least twenty-five feet. “Help me, Alek! Please!”
Alek shook his half-shattered sense back into his head and judged the distance. Even with the collapsed floor, he was looking at no less than a thirty-foot jump to reach the boy. And even if he managed to snag the cords that Danny clung so desperately to, he might bring the rest of the ceiling down on them all with his weight. He stared dumbly at the sight of the shocked, shuddering little body. Think, damnit! There had to be some way. He looked at the boy, then looked at the ravine, that deadly ravine. He thought he knew the only way out of this as bad and dangerous and crazy as it was. But if he failed…
The ceiling gave another warning growl and Alek made the decision, for better or for worse.
“Robyn,” he said, patiently, “tell Danny to let go on three.”
“What?” Robyn turned to stare at him with glassy big-eyed horror. “Are you crazy? That line doesn’t have a bottom!” she said, pointing to the ravine.
“On three,” Alek said, shucking off his coat and taking several steps back. “Do it!”
Robyn shook her head helplessly, shooting tears off in every direction.
Danny cried out and Robyn looked ready to explode from the tension.
“Trust me,” Alek said.
Robyn considered that. For a moment he thought she would continue to defy him. Then she turned back to stare up at Danny’s dangling figure and said, hesitantly, “Tiger…I want you to let go on three. Uncle Alek is going to catch you.”
Danny wailed plaintively, filling the tunnel with his terror and his misery.
“Oh three, honey,” Robyn said, keeping her voice calm. “One...two...”
Again it happened too fast, too fast.
Danny lost his grip on the wires, making Alek leap the cavity much too soon. It was all automatic: one moment Alek was standing on solid ground, the next he was sky bound. It was an awkward jump at best. Alek saw the boy fall…felt the cords brush his cheek…caught a handful of the back of the boy’s windbreaker…but the far side of the chasm looked too hopelessly far away for them to make it. So Alek wound himself like a snake around the boy, somersaulting over once--just enough to give him the spurt of distance he thought he needed, that he prayed he needed--and felt them crash down against the opposite side of the line. He gripped something as they began to slide down the side of the chasm, hoping it would hold their collective weight...hoping...and there!...their momentum was stalled. Then he hoped the something he gripped was secure and waited to see if they would fall anyway. Nothing happened. But pain lanced all the way up both his arm and into his shoulders. His body felt like a lead weight waiting to fall into that dead place for man and train. Yet he couldn’t let go of either the top of the chasm nor Danny, hanging suspended over the line the way they were.
It hurt like hell, but the alternative was too horrible to even think about.
Mustering his courage, Alek looked down. The bottom of the rift was a tangle of steel railroad shards, iron rebar and shivs of shattered bones, all of it covered with a moving coat of filthy, voracious sewer rats. If they fell...no, don’t think of that. You won’t fall if you believe you will not fall. Alek closed his eyes and concentrated on his grip overhead. “Danny?” he said. His voice sounded hoarse. “How are you?”
Danny whined like a pained, frightened little animal. “I want Kage.”
“I know.” Slowly, methodically, Alek pulled against his grip, feeling himself and Danny raise a few inches, then a few more. The muscles of his arm and shoulder began to scream from the effort of pulling them both up by one arm, but he grit his teeth and tried to ignore the burn and the unyielding fatigue and concentrated instead on the work of their survival. Robyn was crying his name, nearly hysterical with terror, and he concentrated on that as well, how very pretty she was and how much he didn’t want to see her in tears, all that pretty ruined. The upper portion of his body was over the edge of the line now. Alek sagged against the side, letting his weight anchor him and swinging Danny over the top. When Danny was secure, he then scrabbled like one of the rats over the edge. When he had made it he crouched against the ledge under the broken Exit sign, the boy cradled in his arms.
He was exhausted. He felt beaten, inside and out.
“You made it!” Robyn shouted.
Alek nodded and sagged against the wall. As he recovered his strength, he examined Danny for injuries. The boy looked shaken and pale but not really harmed. He lifted Danny’s head with two fingers and looked for wounds, just to make certain Kage had not been indulging himself in any way. But just as he had suspected, there wasn’t a single mark on Danny anywhere.
“How you holding up?” he asked the child.
“Okay.” Danny gave Alek a bit of smile. “Your sword is way cool.”
He really was something. A tough little thing. The boy touched Alek’s face, brushed his fingers over Alek’s cheeks and traced his mouth as if he were the most interesting thing in the world to him. “You’re like Kage, aren’t you?”
“Shh,” Alek whispered and Danny smile grew. “Don’t tell anyone.”
Danny nodded solemnly. “Promise.”
“Alek!” Robyn called.
Alek set Danny down and climbed to his feet. “We’re all right,” he called. “Danny is fine.”
Robyn smiled; she looked relieved.
But not a moment later she lost her smile as a mountain of debris began to move under her feet. It shifted sideways, making Robyn scream and roll off the platform and slam into a wall.
Alek watch
ed helplessly as loose rocks and I-beams were thrust up and away like a child throwing stones and sticks. And then something, no child but a monster of frightening physical strength, emerged from its grave of debris, coated in blood and dust and darkness. For a moment it looked around as if disoriented; then its eyes fixed on Alek and Danny and its entire being seemed to grow darker and heavier and full of clacking claws and saber teeth. Kage looked ready to leap the chasm to their side, something he could probably have done easily in his present state, but as blinded by rage as he was, he wasn’t paying attention to his surroundings.
And when Robyn came up behind him with an iron railroad spike in her hand and brought it down with both hands, sinking the metal deep into the sucking cavity between his shoulder blades, driving it in, screaming it in the way she did, Kage never so much as even looked around. The vampire simply stiffened where it crouched at the edge of the chasm, let out a gurgling, blood-clotted sound, and rocked forward into the track, its arms outstretched and useless as it smashed through the debris and its weight caused it to punch through the stakes of steel and bone at the bottom. Rats scattered like a skreeking tidal wave of silky black fur as the body lodged itself at the bottom of the line. But no sooner than it landed, the rats swarmed together again like a sewn seam, blocking the body from view.
Robyn dropped the spike and covered her face with her blood-blackened hands. She swayed, and then collapsed into a lotus on the floor, her hands over her mouth to stifle the illness and the shock and the waning terror.
The voices of the feasting rats filled the tunnel with their rank triumph.
Alek kept Danny’s face averted as he peered down into the chasm. What little he could see of Kage’s body looked pulpy and broken, like doll parts. The rats continued to swarm, a warm living mass of them, furry vultures with only one prerogative in life.
Alek felt sick.
There was another platform on this side of the rail a little ways further down. After checking one last time to make certain nothing down there moved but rats, Alek picked Danny up and shambled down the walk until he reached it. The sub station it led to took a roundabout route through a series of interconnecting corridors, but eventually he found his way to Robyn’s side of the line.
Robyn wept and clung to Danny when she finally had him back in her arms, but Danny was oddly calm, even emotionless. He simply stood there like a rag doll as his mother rubbed his shoulders and checked him all over for scrapes and bruises. “How is my big tiger?” she asked over and over again like a litany. In time Danny nodded and that seemed to put Robyn at ease. Taking his little hand in hers, she turned to Alek. “Can we get out of here now?”
“I can’t think of a better idea,” Alek told her as he started up the stairs of the sub platform. “There’s an exit up here. Come on.”
Robyn followed him, but Danny slowed her progress. The boy didn’t seem motivated to move at all. By the time they reached the Exit door Robyn was fighting to make him walk, pulling at his hand, fighting to get him every inch of the way. Alek put his hand on her arm. “You want me to take him?”
“I don’t understand...”
Danny detached himself from Robyn’s hand and jumped into Alek’s arms.
Robyn looked surprised by it but didn’t say very much as Alek settled Danny’s slight weight into the crook of his arm.
He was tired and aching and he felt like an entire building had fallen on him, but at least it was over. The boy played with Alek’s hair for a few moments, but very quickly his grim adventure caught up with him and he put his head down on Alek’s shoulder. He was fast asleep in minutes, and so he missed all the festival. They emerged in Chinatown, one of his favorite places in the whole city, but this time the familiarity of the colorful Hunan restaurants and antique emporiums and herbal remedy shoppes and the vendors with their carts full of jade and bells and the parade passing by with its lighted paper lanterns and dancing dragon brought no amusement to Alek as it had so often in the past.
25
It had taken some persuasion on his part to convince her that he was not seriously injured. He was touched. She seemed genuinely concerned for him. But Alek told her he was perfectly fine. After a while, Robyn seemed to believe him.
She went to Danny, running her hands through his hair, and glanced around the foyer of the big antique house. She looked lost. Alek hung his coat on the rack by the door, and then looked around the house himself. It was cool, dim and silent, as always. No one had been here that he wasn’t aware of--vampire, dhampir or otherwise. He would know. The Covenhouse was as much a part of him now as the coat he wore was or the sword he carried. He just wasn’t much of a homebody. Somehow or other he always seemed to have business to attend to, and the living space reflected that fact. It wasn’t unkempt or anything like that; it just looked un-inhabited. The spaces were too large, the furniture too sparse, the motif a bit too old-fashioned. It looked like a museum, or the cover of a Victorian-style magazine. He didn’t have much to offer Robyn and Danny, just this big creaky house full of shadows, but what he had was theirs and he told her so.
At least they were safe here. Protected. “You can have whatever you find in the kitchen,” he told them at length. “The bathroom is upstairs and down the hall.” They could have the run of the house. The only places they were forbidden to go were downstairs to the Great Abbey, and the dojo with its collection of razor-sharp weapons. But he didn’t say that outwardly. In fact, he didn’t say it at all. Those places were locked electronically against invasion and he had no fears of strangers wandering into them. “The master bedroom is yours too, if you like,” he said.
“Where will you sleep?” Robyn asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t sleep much, and I won’t sleep at all until this is over.”
Robyn dropped her eyes. She was wondering the same thing he was: When and how would all this end--if indeed, it ended at all? On the way home she had made mention of an aunt in Milwaukee that she hadn’t seen in ten years. Alek’s mind had already turned over the idea that if he could somehow convince Edward Ashikawa that enough blood had been spilt in his insane crusade, he might be willing to let the girl and her boy go. Robyn could go to Wisconsin. That seemed far enough away from this city. And if that failed...well, he still had connections with the Coven, as tenacious as they were, and he knew the Vatican would not be pleased to learn Edward Ashikawa had been stabling vampires among his cotillion of soldiers. Somehow or other he doubted even the Yakuza was willing to take the Papal bull by the horns.
Robyn took Danny by the hand and started to lead him up the narrow Victorian stairs. Halfway up, she turned around and seemed to take in the wainscoting and the old tintypes on the walls and the glistening antique wallpaper all at once. “Is this house yours?” she asked with some wonder.
Alek said, “I inherited it from my father.”
“Oh. He must have been something.”
“He was.” Then without waiting for an answer from her he went into the kitchen to make a pot of strong coffee. It did little to quench his remaining need, but it took the edge off some. He was so tired. He listened to the sound of activity from upstairs and felt very old and lost.
I should not live in this tomb, he thought for the hundredth time since buying the Covenhouse. He didn’t understand why he had done that, only that the fear of the Coven taking his home, living in it, desecrating it further with their bloody purpose, was more than he could bear. He had to protect the house. And he had. And now the house protected him. Jean Paul said it was his hive; in affect, his personal lair. None that entered it could escape his influence. In fact, no one he called enemy could enter it at all. It was all part of the mythology of the vampire, some of it truth, some lies, some half-truths.
He, having lived more than half a century as a dhampir, was still learning the ins and outs, so to speak. In fact, he had begun to keep a journal about it, wondering if anyone else ever had. He wasn’t undead, nor was any vampire. He had never died. Garlic, run
ning water, silver, wooden stakes and religious paraphernalia could do nothing to harm him. Only profoundly strong and long direct exposure to sunlight could do him damage. Only the severance of his head or a stake or shard of iron--or indeed, any instrument of iron stuck in a vital organ-could kill him. As far as he could tell, he was immortal. At least, he looked half his age, which was pushing fifty-five these days. He had a hunger, but it wasn’t usually bad, except on the full moon--what the vampires called the Hunter’s Moon. Like Debra, and like all vampires, his power as well as his need was redoubled on those nights. Nights like tonight.
I’m a vampire living in a crypt, he thought and almost laughed aloud. He hated this house and he loved it. It was his passion and his sin. What else could he do with it?
He changed into his lay-around clothes--black silk slacks, silk slippers and a kimono--and went to the library and stood in it, feeling the house close about him. The years and books and learning and blood. All his. Every scrap. Every memory. He was so tired. Tired and in need. Not for the first time he wondered if visiting Jean Paul’s private pleasure club would help. If it wouldn’t at least ease the discomfort.
No. All he needed to do was fall once, and he would keep falling.
Instead, he lay down on the divan, setting aside Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, and slept. The toll on his body was so great he did not dream and he did not awaken until almost nightfall. The Hunter’s Moon had risen. He got up and went to the window and watched it laze across the sky like a weapon. But the sight of it made him anxious and in time he returned to the divan and picked up the Wharton book and read a page, not really seeing the words. After a few moments he became aware of a presence in the room with him, subtle, like perfume. He looked up and glimpsed a familiar figure in the gilt oval mirror on the wall between two bookcases.
“Thank you,” he said.
Debra smiled and the tie of his kimono loosened.
Slayer: Black Miracles Page 12