He moved past the house, sweating it, certain any moment the man on the stoop picking up the morning paper would look up and give him a knowing smirk, a wink, a complete reflection of the house he dwelled in. But the man, the Slayer, did not look up. He was too preoccupied by some headline on the paper. Brett took the opportunity to study the Slayer as he drove past, his foot doing a nervous tap-dance on the gas pedal. The long black hair, the long thin white hands, the pretty Asian-inspired face, the sinewy, vulpine body. Even out of the coat, Brett could not forget that man, how every element worked together to make him a perfect hunter. A perfect machine.
When he had reached the end of the street he turned off onto one of the main avenues that ran parallel to Hill Street
(once Castle Hill Road
, he remembered Nadine telling him) and rode it numbly down in the direction of Madison. He passed St. Patrick’s Cathedral along the way and had to suppress a shudder. The big stony monolith of a church reminded him a bit too much of the House on Castle Hill, as if both structures had been cut from the same rock.
He sighed with relief when he reached Madison. It was as if he had been lucky enough to escape the den of a lion or something. Stupid. He should have just parked off the street somewhere and approached the house. He had only a short time left, after all. He had told Jay he needed a week to get his business affairs in order for Jay’s great Shakespearian death, and so far he had done nothing but try to egg up his courage to visit this one stupid house. Jay would be gone on his vacation with his wife in only a few days and Brett would have spent the whole time driving past the House on Castle Hill, making up excuses why each day was the wrong day to do this. If he didn’t do this right now, he never would, and his finely crafted plan would be ruined.
But he found he was reluctant. Because, for some unknown reason, he was afraid. Afraid in a nail-biting, sleepless, gorge-constantly-rising-in-your-throat kind of way he had never been before.
Don’t mess with this shit.
Brett frowned, disliking the sound of cowardice echoing up from inside of him. It sounded almost like his father’s voice. And his father had died a penniless bum, working for a Brooklyn slaughterhouse for four bucks an hour. It sounded like his grandfather, who had died even poorer, with a row of numbers like something from a meatpacking plant stamped up and down his arm. You back down and that’s when you lose everything, he thought. Everything.
Not me. Not this bum.
Angry with himself, he pulled back into traffic and headed toward Hill Street
.
12
The first thing Alek thought of when he heard the doorknocker was, Not now! Not so soon! His heart raced, seeming to echo every heavy knock of the brass fixture on that front door, so that for a moment he felt paralyzed by the sound of his own traitorous heart. He closed his eyes to an article about the Ladykiller in the Times he was reading and cocked his head. His hair brushed against his cheek and trailed along the floor from his upside down position on the athlete’s bar. Taking a deep breath, he commanded the fear away. It worked, sort of. He felt his heart slow a little and the instinct to leap straight for the ceiling wasn’t quite so strong, but still…
I can’t live like this.
The knocking continued, making him lose his concentration completely. Dashing the paper away in a waterfall of pages, Alek reached up, grasped the stainless steel bar, and turned himself over once. Then he dropped soundlessly to the floor of the dojo despite the heavy heels of his boots. Another trick of Amadeus’s he had learned a very long time ago. No matter where he was or what he wore, he had been trained to move with the obscurity of a shadow. He had changed into a black T-shirt for his daily training session, but he still had on the jeans from the evening before and now his boots zippered to mid-thigh. He knew his training. The clothes he would wear on the street were always the same ones you trained in.
A towel lay draped over the bench, and beside it, the sword. Alek reached for the sword and saw it drop off the bench and slide halfway across the floor before it stopped in mid-journey. The knocking persisted. But his thoughts were so scattered he could not even perform the simplest tricks anymore. Manually grabbing up the towel and sword, he ignored the fear and concentrated on the anger of his own cowardice as he stalked his way down the long corridor to the front door.
At the foot of the stairs leading to the second floor he paused to listen for Irena, but the poor thing was so exhausted from the night before even the insistent knocking could not wake her.
Someone was out there. He saw the shadow of the visitor reflect against the stained glass of the door. He tried to feel the presence but could conclude nothing about it, which told him nothing except that it was obviously not a vampire. Thank God. Maybe it was a Jehovah’s Witness, he reasoned. That would be nice. I must be the only man in the city who would welcome one now, he thought.
Still keeping the sword at hand, he unlocked the door and opened it a few inches.
Out on the stoop stood a small man in a sandsilk suit and sunglasses. Upper West Side corporate type. Human. There was something vaguely familiar about him, but Alek could not for the life of him figure out what it was, nor why such a being would be here. Unless… was he a human ghoul of Michael’s? No. He didn’t have the look. The smell. If he belonged to Michael, he knew his Jacobson’s organ would pick up on some of that immediately. Not a lot, but some. This man was a blank slate… and yet, he did have an odor about him. Fear, excitement.
A distrustful smell.
The man looked him up and down.
Alek opened the door further but closed his slightly parted lips, cutting off the man’s taste. “Can I help you?”
“I think you can,” the man answered cryptically. “If you’re who I’m looking for.”
Alek lowered his eyes. “And who are you looking for?”
“A man,” the man answered.
Something wrong. Suddenly Alek discovered he did not like this man. Not at all. “There are clubs for that,” he said and tried to close the door.
The man put his foot on the jamb, halting it. “Six-two, about a hundred and eighty pounds. Dark hair and eyes. Good reflexes. Has a leather coat and a sword,” he said, looking at the sword in Alek’s hand.
The jolt of remembrance made Alek let go of the door and step back into the hall. The man took the initiative to let himself in and close the door behind him. Alek stood numbly, his sword knocking against the outside of his thigh.
The man looked at it again, then up at his face. “You remember now.”
“The warehouse.” Alek slipped the sword under his arm, making the man’s eyes skip to follow it. Fear still there, but too much arrogance to let a healthy amount of it in. The man lit a smoke. He had sensed Alek’s distress and it had fueled his arrogance further. Alek couldn’t believe this. He shook his head. “Get out.”
The man raised his eyebrow. “Anyone tell you how photographic you are?”
The camcorder. So he had a tape. Alek had not imagined that little device his lurker had slipped under his coat just before he took off. In the beginning, he had thought there might be something there, something that could get him in trouble. But to be honest, he had not worried about it. There was little to worry about. Rome did not tape and take images of vampires or their kin. And tapes and images of vampires and their kin did not last long otherwise, either. That or the filmmakers.
The Church took care of its own that way.
Alek said, “Get rid of it.”
Predictably, the man smiled, misreading Alek’s reaction completely. “Nice house,” he said, looking around. “Must cost you a fortune to maintain.”
Alek turned around and went down the corridor to the dojo.
The man followed him. “Jesus,” he said when he had taken in the full measure of the dojo, the miscellaneous and barbaric training equipment that had trained dozens of slayers, the iron fans and training staffs on the wall, the innumerable swords, the Catherine Wheel and the Cag
e—a stainless steel device resembling a child’s jungle gym that Amadeus had used to pit slayer against slayer in near-death matches. “You know,” he said when he had managed to compose himself, “I know what kind of sick shit you’re into. I know what you are, Mr. Knight.”
Alek chose a buck knife off the armory wall. “I’m happy for you, Mr. …?”
“Edelman. Brett Edelman.”
“I’m happy for you, Mr. Edelman. Now please leave.”
Instead, Mr. Brett Edelman followed him out of the dojo, down the hallway leading to the butler’s pantry, and out through the rear door to the garden. Alek breathed in the cool morning air, enjoying it. The garden, though not large, was his only indulgence. Encompassed by a ten-foot tall stone wall, it was impossible to see over or even climb, unless you had wings or a very good reason to be doing so. There was one iron gate to the outside, but locked from the inside to keep lurkers out. In the shady part of the garden he had set up four rabbit hutches, each containing six cages apiece. Of the twenty-four cages, eleven had occupants.
“I’m Brett Edelman of Edelman Enterprises. I own and publish Summit Books,” Brett Edelman was saying.
“Congratulations on your success,” Alek whispered as he tied on the leather apron he kept draped over the overhang by the cages. The overhang was little better that a retrofitted acrobat bar fitted with hooks and a stainless steel bucket at its base.
Edelman looked at it. Then he looked at Alek and the buck knife in his hands. “Maybe you’ve read a few? I publish the Baron Blood series.”
“I don’t read horror novels,” Alek said, looking at him and running the blade edge of the knife softly along his cheek to check for sharpness.
“I don’t publish horror, Mr. Knight. I publish supernatural erotic adventures.” Edelman decided to lean against the hanging bar, and then changed his mind when he saw the rusty-brown bloodstains on it like on the pavement at his feet. He looked at his clothing to make certain nothing had rubbed off. “Stories about vampires.”
“Should I be impressed?” Alek asked. Turning, he opened one of the cages and pulled a struggling brown and white rabbit out by the scruff of its neck. It wriggled a moment, its eyes as big as orange jewels in its head. Then, as exhaustion overcame the animal, it hung still, ears and nose twitching erratically.
“Maybe. Depends on how much you value your life here.” Brett Edelman hesitated, then visibly winced as Alek pressed his thumb against the back of the animal’s head, breaking its neck with a resounding crack that seemed to echo against the stone walls of the garden like a gunshot. The animal went limp in his hands. “Jesus.”
This was of course always the hardest part—getting the blood to run before rigor mortis cut off the supply. He’d had ample practice with this so far, but sometimes he was still not fast enough. With one deft motion, Alek used the knife to slit the great vein under the animal’s ear and then slammed the body down on the hooks. The blood ran red, no taint of purple. Good. He’s gotten it fresh. He turned back to Edelman, the bloodied knife in his hand, and crossed his arms.
“Would be a shame if the whole world discovered your awful secret,” Edelman said without much conviction as he stared at the knife.
“Get rid of the tape before it kills you, Mr. Edelman.”
“It’s quite safe, Mr. Knight. No one knows the truth except you and I.” Brett Edelman watched the blood sputter into the bucket. The man paled as if he were the one being bled.
After the blood had leaked out of the body—it did not take long—Alek took the body off the hooks and tossed it over the wall for the stray dog that always came around begging for scraps. He took the bucket and funneled the contents into a jar on the bench, added ten milligrams of sodium citrate to keep it from clotting, and capped the jar and gave it a slight shake so the blackened substance settled correctly. Brett Edelman watched wide-eyed, the cigarette nearly falling out of his mouth.
“What exactly is it you want from me, Mr. Edelman?” Alek asked the man.
It took Brett Edelman a moment to compose himself. Then he said, tossing his cigarette down, “Baron Blood is finished. So is his author, J. Stephan Paul.”
“I’ve read his work. The good work.”
“Jay’s finished,” Edelman said, lighting a fresh smoke. “Right now the man is worth more to me dead than alive, if you get my drift.”
Alek blinked with disbelief as the truth began to sink in. “You want me to murder your author?”
“You sound surprised.”
“Excuse me… but yes, I am.”
“Mr. Knight, I thought you do this all the time.” He looked at the jar.
“I am not an assassin for hire, Mr. Edelman.”
“But you are a slayer.”
Alek narrowed his eyes. “Was a slayer.”
Brett Edelman jabbed his smoke at Alek. “You are the Slayer.”
Alek said nothing.
“You look surprised.”
“Where did you hear that?” Alek asked.
The man smiled. “Doesn’t matter. What does is whether we have a deal or not.”
“Not.”
“And the tape?”
“I told you: get rid of it”
“But I like watching you fight, Mr. Knight.”
“You have no idea what you’re fucking with,” Alek whispered.
“No, Mr. Knight,” Brett Edelman said evenly. “You have no idea who you are fucking with. Who are you, with all your blades and your Kung Fu shit? I have media connections that stretch from the Post all the way up to NBC. I have a fucking vampire dying on tape, Mr. Knight. One transmission over the airwaves and the Internet and the whole world knows the truth about your kind. And if I know you, and I suspect I do, you don’t like media attention. I think media attention would kill your kind faster than the Coven does. What do you think?”
Alek sank the buck knife into the bench beside Edelman.
Brett Edelman backed up.
Alek untied the apron and folded it neatly. He said, “I think you’re in way over your head, Mr. Edelman. I think you should stop thinking about murdering your author and go home. Now.” Alek pulled the knife from the wood and drifted toward him. Edelman began to back up very slowly, more or less walking backwards until his back hit the rear door of the house and there was nowhere left for him to go.
Alek leaned forward and laid the flat of the blade against the collar of the immaculate white shirt poking out of Mr. Edelman’s sandsilk jacket. The white turned pink.
“You kill me and they’ll find the tape,” Edelman said, hoarse.
“I’m not going to kill you, Mr. Edelman,” Alek answered. “I’m just showing you the way out.” He wiped the bloody knife on the white material.
With a little nervous whimper, Edelman dashed for the gate at the end of the garden path, rattled the lock until it opened, then took off walk-running down the sidewalk. Alek stood at the gate and watched him go, wondering about it all.
He could almost have smiled. It was almost a comedy. But after a moment the amusement faded as he remembered other pressing things that demanded his attention, and he closed the gate and returned to the house with the jar.
Irena was in the kitchen, standing there in his black dressing gown, looking like an odd choirgirl. “I heard voices in the garden.”
He looked her over. Her hair was a wild tanglewoods and her eyes haunted and fever bright. Her skin was freckled but it was light against her white skin, the dappling of a young filly. Again he felt his heart contract at the sight of her. “It’s nothing important.”
She looked around the kitchen that had not been renovated in thirty years. The stove and refrigerator were spotless. Dusty pots hung from a rack above the oven. The clear glass cupboards were filled with goblets, but only a handful of dishes filled one of the shelves.
He poured the rabbit’s blood from the jar into a goblet he had placed on the table. “Lesson number one. You must drink constantly in the beginning. It is the only way to maint
ain control.” He gave her the glass. “Control is everything. Without it, you die.”
She took the glass. He could feel the hunger radiating from her in waves. She started to drain it like she had last night, but he grabbed her wrist.
“Sip,” he said. “Control.”
A war played out on her anguished face, but in the end she did as he instructed. Her hands shaking, she sipped from the goblet and then placed it down on the table.
“Good.” He sat down at the table.
So did she. Then she took the glass and gulped.
He yanked the glass away. “No.”
She sat quietly, clasping her hands in her lap to keep them in place.
“Lesson number two. Food. Since your first kill, your metabolism has begun to change. You probably notice that what humans call food now nauseates you.” He pushed the goblet forward but Irena didn’t reach for it this time. “You must continue to eat human food. Every day. Humans believe we cannot eat. We can and we must.”
Irena stared at the goblet. “I’ve eaten food all of my life.”
He said. “What has happened to you is a natural step in your growth. You were not changed. Vampires cannot change humans any more than a human can bite and change a vampire. The two are separate species. The trauma of your attack simply invoked your true nature.”
“You said I wasn’t a vampire.”
“You are and you are not.” He watched her sip.
She wiped her mouth and said, “Why doesn’t anyone know?”
“They do. But they think this is a myth. This is not. This is your survival. Lesson number three. You are immortal, but you can still die if your head if severed from your body. To prevent this, you must learn to fight.”
She looked up, angry, afraid. “I can fight.”
Slayer: Black Miracles Page 20