Akisha dropped her eyes to her beautiful young victim. Like the others, a swan, a crimson swan. Yet he breathed, his life's rhythm steady and sound. A look almost of profound insight seemed to hover at the edges of his expression. Undoubtedly he was having the deepest, most evocative dreams of his young life. Like some worshiper of the waterpipe in a London opium den, a bomb could have fallen over the city and he would remain undisturbed in his mistress' playground of the mind.
"Does it seem that I am?" Akisha asked innocently.
The slayer glanced aside and said, "The city is understandably disturbed by these murders. Missing children, rumors of bodies picked clean of meat, of blood. The police are calling it Vulture Murders. You can imagine." He found himself whispering as though her victim were a young child in need of his sleep. And surely he was; how else would he endure yet another night of so dark a passion with his mistress? The thought caused a stir deep in the slayer's belly and loins that he put aside immediately as ridiculous emotional shrapnel from another life. "This thing--it could have repercussions. The stories...I'm only seeking the truth."
She watched him intimately. She smiled. So near and tainted with her lover's life and her face gained a wistfullness the slayer sometimes wondered if only he ever saw in it. "And so the Coven sends forth their gallant knight-errant to slay the dragon. How old-fashioned. What about the other possibility? This is New York. Human beings are still capable of deviant behavior, or has the Coven forgotten that?"
"That possibility exists," he admitted. "I'm not certain if they suspect someone or if they merely feel the need to investigate. But either way, it's become my problem." He stopped speaking.
Akisha was reaching for him. He closed his eyes and followed her presence as it closed in on him over the prone body of the child. It glowed darkly, her presence, like a living cloak. He shifted his weight and moved his hand down an inch. He automatically brushed the hilt of the sword under his coat.
Akisha's bitterly-sweet lips hovered an inch from his throat. "You still don't trust me, do you, Alek?" she said. "So long I've known you, known all your secrets and not spoken a word. But you will not trust me..."
He waited in defiance of her words. No razor-sharp instrument slashed his face or cut his lip or throat. He opened his eyes and there was just Akisha in all her cold black and white beauty, waiting without patience. He shook his head and looked away. "You have the Book of Deborah on that shelf over there," he said. "One of the Apocryphal books. It was edited from the final text of the Bible in the Tenth Century by King James."
"You are changing the subject."
"No," he looked up into her proud exotic face, "this is the subject."
"What? Censorship?"
"Yes," he said. "No one ever gets the whole story. Only fragments, rumor. But rumor is dangerous. A rumor can destroy a man. Or a species."
Akisha locked her jaw.
He touched her hair compulsively. Oriental silk. Real when so much else was not. "Tell me the story. Tell me who is murdering those children. I have to know, Akisha. I can't walk away otherwise."
"Empirius," she said, closing her eyes, "does not harbor rogues."
"Perhaps he does not know this one well enough."
"Empirius knows everything about everyone."
"Then perhaps he is being set up by someone wanting his downfall?"
Akisha laughed. "With Empirius gone I would be sole ruler of the vampires here until I became again bound. My period is in three months. Do you think I am doing all this terrible murder so Empirius is ruined and I am widowed and powerful for all of ninety days?"
He shook his head at her wryness and wound a lock of her hair around his finger. He sensed her cold--her sudden thrill of fear for him because he was one of the few threats she still continually faced in her unchanging, uncomplicated life. "I think you know much," he said. "You always did."
Again the innocence like a little-loved veil seemed to fall all over Akisha's face. Her sudden look was feverish, almost desperate to speak. And yet she held it all in perfect disciplinarian check. "I think," she said after a moment, "that you should join us tonight, unseen. I can tell you no more than that."
As the slayer wandered down the streets he noticed men and women walking past on either side, completely unaware of what moved in their midst.
It was late Sunday afternoon and the tourists were emerging from Broadway matinees and dinner at Mama Leone's and being safely bussed back to their suburbs in Jersey and Connecticut. There was a young mother with a little girl standing outside of the Winter Garden Theatre where it seemed Cats had been playing forever. The little girl, whose eyes had been turned forlornly at the wintry grey sky only a moment ago, suddenly dropped her gaze and centered it on him.
And for one spare moment he saw himself through her eyes--long black scarecrow hair, leather longcoat, the undulating sensuality of a black snake that she had seen in a school film only a few days ago--and he caught himself like a vain man with the annoying habit of studying his reflection in every facade of glass and mirror, and tucked his conscious eye back into the pocket of his own flesh.
Her eyes widened. What did she see? Only a tall strange man all in black? Or was it death-in-waiting? If only he could know. The girl turned to tell her mother, but already he was gone, dissolved back into the irreverent current of society where the carpet of concrete could usher him along anonymously toward the place where all his decisions would be made in only a few hours.
"The day before He suffered to save us and all men, he took offering in his hands and looking up to heaven, to you, his almighty Father, he gave you thanks and praise. He broke the bread, gave it to his disciples, and said: Take this, all of you, and eat it: this is my body which will be given up for all of you. When the supper had ended, he took the cup. Again he gave you thanks and praise, gave the cup to his disciples, and said: Take this, all of you, and drink from it: for it is the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me.
"My people, let us proclaim the mystery of faith. Our Father, we celebrate the memory of Christ, your son. We your people and ministers recall his passion, his Resurrection and his Ascension, and from the many gifts you have given us we offer to you, God of glory and life eternal, this holy and perfect sacrifice: this child of God who is now the body of Christ and the cup of eternal salvation which is His life's blood."
For a moment Empirius glanced down at the child bound to the blood-blackened altar at the center of his club. The look clouding the child's eyes was one of utter doom. Not forced worldly misery as like so many of the children which visited the club and mingled with the damned, but true bone-quaking fear. Empirius smiled on him in the smallest, most meaningful way. Then he took up the steel knife lying beside the chalice on the pall and, with that gesture, dragged the instrument across the boy's throat. Blood pumped out of the open wound, washing the altar stone, darkening it farther. The child frantically gulped as his life pulsed out of his body in thick almost-purple pulses. Empirius placed the chalice under the torrent of blood and filled it halfway to the rim with the hot crimson liquid. An audible sigh, almost as great as a sung note, ran through the congregation of vampires gathered for Mass as the air became charged with the radiant fragrance of life eternal.
"Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, and said, "Take: eat, this is my body, broken for you." And with that and a surgeon's precision, Empirius sliced deep into the meat of the boy's side.
Alone in the aftermath of Mass--by now the others returned to their warrens and city apartments--Empirius knelt down before the altar and sipped the remaining blood off the stone. The warmth entered the frozen labyrinth of his metabolism like the merest whimper compared to the raw primal roar of a true feeding, a true death. No matter how many times he tried to convince himself that the mechanics of this outlet might indeed be the redemption he and his people had been seeking so long
, he could never overcome his contempt for the process, for the policing of slayers and the Coven and all the things that existed to deaden the rage of the hunt to him and to his fellows. Cursed by memory and by age, he still recalled in his private moments the sweet burning red rage of the predatory hunt and kill, the food of victory. For all the many miseries his state of existence had cost him, the days of mankind's ignorance and the vampire's absolute freedom were ingrained in his makeup for all time, never, never did he want the memories to fade, the lust to let him go. Even as his fingernails dug into the soiled stone and his lips sought even the smallest warmth remaining, specters of past victims surrounded him, mocking him with their ultimate victory: The great and ancient Venetian vampire lord Empirius, and here he scrabbled at the blood of the dead like a starved creature!
He sat back quite suddenly. A door had closed at the back of the vacant club, the sound as great as a gunshot in the silent chamber. In the corner of the catwalk that circumvented the pit a figure materialized, dark on dark, too dark for even Empirius to recognize it at first. He jerked backwards a step and narrowed his eyes. "Who's there? Akisha?" he asked hopefully. "Sal?"
The slayer stepped forward formally, a hand on the hilt of his sword in the event Empirius drew a challenge, and began the slow descent down the grilled steps into the pit. It would have been over much faster in a surprise affront, the slayer knew that--faster and far tidier--but nowhere near what he wanted. A dead vampire, no answers to his many questions--no.
"Ah...Master Alek."
The slayer sighed heavily. "I thought perhaps it was one of your young thralls, one of their perversities," he whispered. "But you?" He tilted his head. "Empirius?"
The vampire's pose relaxed. In less than a blink of an eye he went from absolute guard to absolute openness, as if he'd come to the conclusion that there was nothing to defend, no reason to panic and work his persuasion now. He would not beg. The slayer knew that.
"How did you see?" he asked, taking a step forward in defiance of fear, tilting his head, as expressionless as a cat. "Where were you? Not among the Mass? You couldn't have seen--"
"I saw through your eyes, Your Grace."
Empirius laughed appreciatively, wiping the blood from his face. "And I did not even feel your presence inside of me. God bless him, Amadeus must be a proud man to have such an acolyte as you, Master Alek."
Like a man hefting a lead weight--in such a manner did the slayer draw his sword on reaching the bottom of the pit. It all but sung in the spare silver light of the slumbering city filtering in through the stained blue glass of the windows. For the first time in many years, the slayer felt its streamlined weight in his wrist and elbow. Quite absently, as if to put off the task at hand, he glanced sidelong at the intricate engravings in the ivory of the katana, the battles fought, won and lost, that predated him by half a millennium. Stories. Mythos. One of them was Akisha's tale of the peasant girl who donned the garb of her brother and went on to influence the ninja jonin so completely. The same story, incidentally, was reproduced just as beautifully in one of the windows of the club.
He said, "Why, Your Grace?" He shook his head, trying to find Akisha's story in glass. "Your reputation was admirable. Mortals donated their blood and bodies to your flock every night. You wanted for nothing. Why bring yourself to this?"
Empirius smiled as he considered his blood-soiled altar. Dressed now in his papal robes and dark purple mantle as he was, he cut the figure of an ancient like few vampires could. It was his eyes; the age was less a parody in them than most. When he spoke of the Crusades, the Reformation, it was with a jaded wisdom not to be found in any but the oldest of souls. He said now with muted amazement, "Do you know, Master Alek, that many of my flock have grown to consume flesh with little or no problem? Even some of the elders?"
"I noticed. Why do I care? Why do you?"
Again Empirius laughed, this time with disgust. "When God put you together, my slayer, He was kind and brilliant, to be sure. And because of that fact, or perhaps despite it, you are an ignorant creature. You, the evolved, have never had to subsist on blood. How could you know the wonder of what you beheld this night?" He spread his hands as though to bestow a benediction. "The glory of it?"
The slayer stepped forward and Empirius's attention automatically snapped to the sword at the slayer's side. "What I beheld was a felony. What I beheld could easily raise a third Inquisition. I fail to see the religious significance of that."
"I am curing my people with salvation."
"There is no salvation for us," the slayer whispered. "There is only control. Don't make excuses."
"I am not. You want answers to my intentions. I am giving them to you."
The slayer let out his breath and the temperature inside the club was so low it plumed like a ghost in the dark. For a moment the clockless silence seemed to echo to the very height and breadth of this converted machineshop. "And," he said, "do they believe that--do they believe that your communion will save them?"
"Why do you care?" Empirius mocked him.
"I don't. I just want to know."
"Vampires believe no more in heaven or hell than mortal man. No angels or devils make themselves apparent to us, no matter what the paperback lies say," Empirius answered. "I am sorry if this disappoints you, my slayer, but it is true. It is all a matter of Faith."
"And do you believe in your salvation?" the slayer whispered. His voice sounded deadened, as if the club were unwilling to let his words go.
"I believe as much in my faith and my purpose as the pope does his."
"And what does that mean?"
"Nothing," said Empirius. "It means nothing. You did not come here to duel in philosophies with an old man. You came here to fulfill your master's will. So let it be." Unlacing his fingers, the old vampire genuflected before his altar and placed his ear to the bloodstained surface of it. He closed his eyes, his mouth a straight severe line of determined surrender.
For a moment the slayer was disoriented and he wondered if Empirius was working some form of influence over him. A large part of him stood ambivalent to the entire thing like the observer of a stage play, and that part wondered wistfully if there would be a happy ending after all. But a greater part knew the answer to that question. There were no happy endings, just inevitable conclusions. The Coven would not have taken notice of this situation if anything but this type of work was required. The vampires policed themselves. The Coven made it so. If justice was not metered out just so, the mechanics by which the vampires had come to terms with Rome and human civilization would be jeopardized.
Yet that wasn't enough this time. Jesus, but Empirius was all but a celebrity in his people's mind. And the slayer realized he had to reach farther this time--for a fault, for the unrelieved fear in the dead boy's eyes, the passion of panic that had made them shine so like the eyes of a roadkilled animal, alive but not alive--
The young body had been picked clean by the congregation, the body drained like a wineskin. The slayer closed his eyes and reformed the child's face in the private slideshow of his mind, his drowning, contorting face, the regret of his brief life stamped so cruelly on his features. And with that vision, he asked himself why he had waited till the end, what madness had held him sealed to the spot outside the club and enthralled his mind and body. And in response to that he swept forward with the dangerous catlike grace so long ingrained in his makeup and training and he took a handful of Empirius's hair in his fist and jerked the sharp of the sword across the back of Empirius's neck like a man wrenching a lever into activation and he closed his eyes and heard nothing but the pattering of loosened life, of fingernails screeking on altarstone in a dying deathgrip, and the sound filled his head like a migraine and pained his teeth.
Akisha sat bolt upright in the black satin bed she shared with her bonded mate, and her involuntary shout was a wolfhowl of agony and release both.
The letting of blood stained the four walls of the club and the floor like paint acr
oss an artist's loft.
The slayer went to the bar and uncorked a bottle of Russian White, pouring three-finger's worth into a glass stein. On the floor lay the body of Empirius, mangled in death and beauty. Another swan, but slaughtered, this one. Eternal in death and touched by silver light. It lay crumpled and fetal and awaiting the strange funerary practices of his kind--the loving evisceration and ritual consumption of the vitals and fluids, the butterflied flesh allowed to smolder in the rising day--the practices the slayer himself could scarcely remember they were so strange. He took a quick pull off the whiskey bottle, then stepped forward, walking on the blood of the creature, and retrieved the severance where it had rolled just behind the altar. He dropped it into the gunny sack tied to his belt under his coat. The will of the master, of the Coven, be fulfilled, he thought as he ignored the slam of the body which had fallen to the floorboards above his head, the ratlike scritch of fingernails seeking purchase in pain and release. Akisha would survive her freedom like she survived her bondage. Akisha, in her cunning, had outlived nations.
Her revenge was complete.
The Coven's will--fulfilled.
Taking the bottle, the slayer retreated to the door of the club, his eyes full of liquid night and a hand pressed to his mouth to stop the first cup coming back up his throat.
2
A letter from His Eminence Cardinal Henri Guiseppe, Special Attendant to His Holiness and Chairman of the Vatican Historical Board to Father Joshua Benedictine, Representative of the New York Branch of the Vatican Historical Council, postdated February 11, 1962:
Slayer Page 2