Slayer: Black Miracles

by Karen Koehler

  The craving was back, gnawing at him like a rainy-day ache. But he was grateful for Robyn’s presence in the house despite the conflict she aroused in him. It gave him purpose and a mission when otherwise he might give in and see what Jean Paul could do for him.

  Yes--the house needed that humanity. He made the decision. When this was over he would seek out a maid or butler or chauffeur service. Something human that could fill this house. Robyn? No. It had to be human but know nothing of his world. It would serve this house, but it would also live in danger from the very beings that sought his downfall. The Coven. The hives he had harmed in all his years as an agent of the Coven. That was the only way he could focus on something other than the craving. He would be using the poor unfortunate

  individual, yes, but better that than the alternative.

  Become a predator of men. Lose himself.

  Even if one soul fell, that was better than a legion of them. Wasn’t it?

  “Hi.”

  He turned his head when he heard the high sweet voice of the girl. There she stood in the Parlour, still dressed in his robe. “Hi,” he said uncertainly.

  She ventured forward. “I’m sorry for before.”

  He shrugged. He ought to be the one apologizing, but he still wasn’t sorry. He had done what he did to save her. To save himself. “Things happen.”

  “You’re very forgiving,” she said. “Alek.”

  He had a sudden urge to run away from her. He didn’t know why, only that something was wrong somewhere. He tried to pinpoint the exact feeling but it eluded him.

  She reached for the front of his kimono and traced the embossed tigers there. The kimono had once belonged to Akisha. Precious, eternal Akisha. And it bore her insignia. The Tiger. Power in battle and adversity. Now Robyn touched the robe she wore with curious wonder and familiarity, and he wondered if she would make another play for him and sighed inwardly at the coming battle. Their arrangement would not work. Not in any way. He wished he could make her understand that.

  But instead of trying to divest herself of the fabric, she reached into the waistband of her underpants and withdrew the railroad spike she had used on Kage. He was surprised she had kept it. She showed it to him. Its tip was rusty with age and discolored with the vampire’s blood, but still very sharp. And it was iron. Deadly iron. He looked at it. What did she mean by showing it to him?

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I love you.”

  Amadeus had professed such love himself, once. Alek thought about that in the second before Robyn rammed the sharpened tip of the iron stake into his heart. And then he had another thought. He thought about how everyone who ever said they loved him did so just before they tried to kill him.

  28

  The dhampir glanced up at her with curiosity. He was confused and in that instant Robyn struck, spearing the tip of the spike at the creature’s heart. She should have known better. Inhuman reflexes enabled the thing to shift to the left to evade the stab even as its hand closed around Robyn’s wrist and squeezed. Exquisite agony shot up Robyn’s arm and shoulder and she automatically dropped the spike. She tried to wrench loose, but the dhampir shoved, sending her to the floor on her knees and close to where the spike had landed. Her left hand wrapped around it as the dhampir twisted her right arm in an attempt to make her drop the spike. Gritting her teeth against the anguish, Robyn lanced the spike in her left hand up and in, the point cutting deep into the dhampir’s stomach.

  It was not its vulnerable heart, but it was close enough.

  As if jolted by a stun gun, the dhampir stiffened, pushed her away, and tottered backward, his shoulders smashing into the window and cracking it like an eggshell. Knocked onto her back, Robyn saw the dhampir double over and fall to his knees, his cloak of long hair mercifully hiding his wan, tormented features from Robyn’s view. It would not be like last time, Robyn reflected; it would not be like with Daddy or with Kage. She would not have to see the monster’s eyes as he begged for life and then began to die for her.

  Robyn rose into a crouch. By all rights the push the dhampir had dealt her should have cracked her skull open or at least stunned her. Yet it had been no worse than the slaps she had gotten from Daddy when he wanted her and didn’t want to want her--which meant the creature was weak. Maybe it was dying.

  There would never be a better opportunity for escape. Scrambling up, she made for the bedroom and for Danny. Not thinking. Fleeing.

  Of course she should have known better. She should have known Kage was not dead. Things like Kage and like Alek and like Edward and like Kurayami and like Daddy never died. They just lived on and on, hovering at the edges of dreams and nightmares. She stopped in the doorway, just looking at Kage, or what remained of Kage, crouched in the open window.

  The vampire was in pieces. Not merely his clothing but himself as well, his skin and in some places even his bones, as if the flesh had been separated and worried and scraped bleeding off his body, the bones broken, tendons torn and frayed like hemp. There was a gaping hole in his chest where Robyn had put the railroad spike in, and from out of that hole bubbled a seemingly endless supply of fetid black juice shot through with the poison of iron and a colony of writhing grey maggots. Kage breathed, a rattling sound that made Robyn think of snakes and the chains on wolf traps. And then black stuff, as black as leather, as black as his inhuman, hungering eyes, coughed past Kage’s torn lips and shattered teeth. .

  Kage grinned but it was not a grin of pleasure, nor even one of menace.

  It was hunger. Pure, animalistic hunger. Bestial. Unbound.

  He was like a god of hunger.

  Hunger for her...hunger at her...

  “Do you know,” Kage grated like his mouth was full of blood and dirt, “what it is like…to be eaten alive?”

  Robyn shook her head. She needed to back out of the room and slam the door between them, but the site of the half-eaten, ravaged creature paralyzed her. The suffering in his eyes.

  Have to leave, she thought frantically, have to-

  Stay.

  No!

  Stay, said his eyes.

  Stay…

  He still had that power.

  Kage leapt at her and it was over in seconds. She could not have reacted. She could not have resisted. She could not have uttered even a single cry of alarm. In seconds she found she was inches from his ruined face, his black, pupilless eyes. She tried to cry out, to pull away, but she was held fast in an unbreakable vise. His hands, his godlike, alien eyes...

  Kage smiled.

  Robyn saw the creature’s sharp, bonelike teeth and smelled its meaty breath, the ghost of the things it must have consumed in the tunnel pit to get him this far. The rats. The rats he--It--had eaten, the rats that had eaten it. She nearly gagged. Eyes wide, she beheld its tongue slithering out of its mouth--a narrow, black, forked tongue. A dragon’s tongue. Nausea welled up within her as the tip touched her mouth. She pressed her lips tightly shut, yet Kage rammed its tongue into her, filling her with the taste of raw iron and spoiled meat, entwining with her own, making her shudder with nausea.

  Sobbing, Robyn finally began to fight for her life, scratching and clawing at Kage’s face. Yet nothing she did seemed to hurt him. She peeled off strips of dripping red flesh and still he grinned his hungry grin. Kage struck her and she fell roughly back onto the bed to within inches of Danny’s still, stunned form. His slap was not like Alek’s, nor even like Daddy’s. She saw the room dance this time. She tried to rise but she was too weak. And then Kage was there, burying under her robe, touching her everywhere, tasting her everywhere, its tongue flaying at her flesh. Rage flooded through her when the creature’s tongue darted out and licked at her navel. “Leave me alone!” she screamed, squirming uselessly, pounding him with her fists and her voice and her rage. “Goddamn you all to hell!”

  “Hell,” Kage said, though it was little more than a rattle forced through his bloody-caked mouth and reptilian teeth.

  It was the last word
Robyn heard before the creature’s broken shark like teeth sliced through her throat and ended her pain forever.

  29

  Alek opened his eyes and saw the demon directly overhead, backlit by the milky light of the city and the Hunter’s Moon. He blinked in confusion and tried to rise.

  Dizziness and a rending pain in the deepest part of himself convinced him

  otherwise.

  “No,” spoke the demon in a scathing, rattling voice. “Just lie still.”

  He waited, watching the attentive face of the demon. After a while he realized the demon was not a demon, after all. It was a vampire, but he took cold comfort in that fact. It was a horrendous vampire, a fiendish being covered in blood and wounds and strips of black fabric that passed for clothing. It was something from a pit. Something from its own grave. Something unto death. As he watched, the vampire disappeared for a moment, and then stepped back into his line of vision with its hands cupped. Something splashed down on top of him, making him bite his tongue at the agony that zagged through him like a steel knife. He clamped his teeth shut, yet he could not prevent the mournful sound of anguish that rose up and up in his throat.

  “It hurts,” said the vampire. It canted its head to one side and Alek saw its ragged mane of hair was bound with chain and a steel ball. Kage. “That’s good. If you could not feel at all, that would mean you were dying.” More blood was dribbled into his wound, and with the blood, more pain. The heels of his boots beat arythmically against the floor. He thought he would explode from the pain, the immortal pain. Finally, mercifully, after some minutes Kage stopped tormenting him and knelt down. He smelled like death and Alek began to breath out of his mouth by reflex to cut the odor of the grave.

  “You don’t smell so well yourself, brother,” Kage said. His grey, caustic face showed no emotion, as always, yet there was purpose in his gestures. He reached down and took hold of the stake of iron in one of his hands. The other hovered over Alek’s face a moment before clamping down over the bridge of his nose, the heel sinking under his palate, his upper canine teeth sinking deep into the hand.

  Alek choked, but it was a momentary discomfort. And then there was a sensation to which his entire body responded--a white-hot flash of fire from within that ripped a gushing hole loose and actually lifted his body several inches off the floor. Alek screamed through his teeth, biting against the hand preventing him from snapping his tongue loose, and it was like the roar of a lion or the cry of a wolf, something elemental and inhuman, a sound so strange it did not seem possible it came from his own throat. He tasted blood, rotten, and he began to gag in earnest this time. To gag and writhe.

  Be still, said Kage’s eyes.

  And Alek was. And he lay as still as a corpse and felt the hissing heat of his own immortal blood filling the hole the iron stake had left in his stomach. His fingernails tore strips of the blood-soaked carpet from the floor. He was in hell. He must be dying. He was...

  “Alive,” Kage whispered as he released his hold on Alek’s face, the palm of his frayed hand smearing the blood across Alek’s cheek like war paint. “Alive and immortal and cursed to walk this world forever, a plague unto yourself.”

  Damned.

  “Yes.”

  Alek felt the pain recede...not fast, not fast enough for his liking…but at least he could breathe now and he had stopped roaring in anguish. He tasted his shed tears and blood. He felt his heart--it was running like a clock in his chest, but at least it was running. He sagged back against the floor, unable to move, unable to do more than shake his head at Kage and utter silently the only word he was capable of:

  “Why?”

  Kage threw down the railroad spike. “It was what the master wanted, nothing more. Don’t read too much into it. The next time we meet, Slayer, things will be very different.”

  The master…

  And then Alek remembered. Through the pain he remembered it all. Danny, Robyn, Kage. Everything.

  And then it was obliterated again by a waxing cramp of hunger. Craving. The wanting that never, never seemed to leave him, damned and immortal as he was. He curled himself around the pain, almost weeping in the clutch of its power, as helpless as a child. As helpless as Danny, his Danny…

  Kage seemed to regard him with something like curiosity. “You saved Danny. I can’t tell you what that means to me, and so I will show you instead.” Again he touched Alek, but this time he took great care in it, unwinding him, his fingers on Alek’s face, under his chin. With a force that was gentle, yet firm, Kage tilted Alek’s head back. The sensation of having his throat exposed panicked him and he started to whimper and struggle. Again Kage commended him to be still, and he was. He had no strength to fight the vampire’s will. No desire.

  Kage held him fast and leaned down, his tongue finding Alek’s mouth in something like an exploratory kiss. Kage’s tongue entered Alek’s mouth like a snake in a hole, stealthy, and twined with Alek’s own for a moment before raking against his canines. The barest touch...and it set his entire body on fire with the need. The endless craving. And when Kage convulsed and offered Alek the gift of life Alek could no more deny it than a dying man in the desert could deny a drink of life-giving water.

  Alek drank it all. His body drank it all, his hurting, starved body cleaving to the nourishment. He groaned as his body returned to life, pain fluttering away-not gone but now lurking at a distance--wounds netting at almost preternatural speed. He found Kage’s hair, the chain, his fingers tangling in it, his mouth and tongue seeking and begging yet more and more life from Kage’s mouth. Kage responded. He must have fed heavily for he seemed to give in an endless, frenzied passion before the giving became too much for his own recovering body and he broke the kiss and forcefully pushed Alek’s body down.

  Alek’s mind was spinning, body humming with energy. “More?”

  “No more for you, Slayer. You’ve had enough.”

  Enough. No, there could never be enough...

  But too much and he would suffer for it.

  “That’s right,” Kage said.

  You can know my thoughts?

  “For a short time,” Kage said. “Until our bond weakens.”

  Our bond...

  Alek looked on Kage and he looked inside of him. All that terror, all those years. The loss and the sorrow…and yet there was love, too. He thought it could not be possible, yet it was. Kage was not merely devoted to Danny. He did not mindlessly serve the boy any more than he had any of his great human masters. There was love there as well. The love he cleaved to, because it subjugated the monster. He loved Danny, was in love with Danny. And that love was a wonderful, overwhelming feeling of happiness to be so near someone so special. To be so complete in the presence of another. To be loved. To serve. To be precious.

  To feel human…

  Alek’s jealously was like a river.

  “He loves you too. You have become a part of us both.” Kage stood up.

  Alek knew he was leaving for good, and that they would not face each other again, except as enemies. Perhaps the love would remain, but it would not exist between the two of them. It was love of common blood, Alek realized. Dragon’s blood. A strange elixir.

  They shared Danny. That was all.

  Alek sat up. He was still weak, but he would live. Not a foot from where he lay was the iron railroad spike that nearly ended his life. He picked it up.

  Robyn?

  Dead in our eyes, as I have said, Kage said as he hovered in the window. Beneath the tatters of his coat was a little figure with large shimmering eyes.

  Alek smiled.

  Uncle Alek, said Danny.

  Had he really heard that? Had he?

  And then they were gone, both of them. Just gone.

  Alek was confused. He went to look out the broken window, but there was nothing to see but night. And then went upstairs to the bedroom. There were bloodstains on his sheets and duvet, but that wasn’t so unusual. There was always blood somewhere.

 
He stood in the room, the stake in his hand, and wondered about Robyn.

  She was gone.

  And he never saw her again.

  30

  One week to the date, Alek went to see Edward Ashikawa at his house. It was a common day. The men at the gate let him in--somewhat reluctantly as usual--and he was looked over suspiciously and asked to unload any firearms, again, as usual. But he had none of those and had never owned any anyway, so it made no difference to him. He was allowed to keep the sword, and that was the only thing that counted.

  The butler-henchmen said Mr. Ashikawa was in the courtyard taking tea and would Alek be joining him this afternoon? Alek said he would.

  Outside in the courtyard, at the top of the stairs to the gazebo, sat the Dragon Lord of the Yakuza. He was sipping green tea and reading the New York Times in the beautiful light of day. He folded down the newspaper and regarded Alek with some surprise before saying, “I admire you. You have an enormous amount of courage coming here.”

  Alek regarded the man overtop the round black shades he was wearing against the fierceness of the light. “Well, the way I see it, you haven’t tried to kill me in the last week and I have no interest in killing you at all, so I’m hoping this is a truce.”

  Edward Ashikawa considered that, but before he could respond, a little voice interrupted them both.

  “Uncle Alek!” And then there was Danny running around the side of the great fountain and throwing himself forward into Alek’s arms. Alek dropped down and caught him and Danny locked his arms around Alek’s neck and started to squeeze like a vice with an iron grip. Alek noted that little Danny certainly had his father’s strength. “You sure took a long time in coming,” Danny said. “What took you so long?”