The spit dried in Alek's mouth and for a moment he could do nothing but stare numb and disconnected at his master's narrow, questing gaze. Covenmaster. He shook his head slowly as feelings--mostly utter raw bone-vibrating terror--began to filter back into the byways of his body. "Father," he stuttered, "Father, you--you said this was many years off, if at all, you said--
"We don't have many years anymore, Alek. Are you ready?"
"I--I don't know, this--it's so sudden."
"You know."
"I would try, Father, you know that, but--"
"You must. Close your eyes. Come into the dark with me. Into our secret place."
What he was asking now, not just duty, but communion, the sharing of souls that was so like lovemaking, yet so alien to it too, so much more than it, was overwhelming. All of it, overwhelming. So much so, that instead of falling into the old rhythms they had laid down decades earlier, Alek simply stood there, stunned and swaying, hanging in a place where there was no will, no decisions, no self...
And in that place the Father came to him quietly, his hands falling like ashes upon his acolyte's shoulders. Amadeus pulled him close, so close they breathed nearly as one and whispered the words of the communion into his mind: Blessed are they who come to my table and partake of my supper. Blessed be...
No, the Father's vision was wrong. Everything was fucking wrong suddenly. He was here to leave his offering and play a friendly game of chess with his teacher, not learn of his demise, not be told he was next in line for this horrendous responsibility. Covenmaster. When had the world gone so horribly wrong?
But then Amadeus smiled as sadly as an angel and held him for he was quite incapable of standing on his own and stroked his acolyte's cheek, murmuring the soft scalding terms of endearment that had so comforted Alek as a child. Amadeus kissed him as though to savor him, long and lingering, drinking his acolyte in with his mouth, taking the salt from his cheeks, the fear from his words, offering only the breath of comfort on his face, his throat.
At the little place behind his ear Alek felt the tips of a delicate set of teeth graze his skin. He shuddered, thinking of how a big cat breaks the neck of its prey, yet his shudder of expectation did nothing to slake the Father's desire, nor did he want it to. It had been so long. Alek closed his eyes and held on and remembered how awkward he'd felt when Amadeus had first offered him this thing. Twelve, he'd just turned twelve, yes, and it had been the first time in their daily sparring bouts that he had met every deft move of Amadeus's sword with his own. They had come together corps a corps that day, in utter symmetricism, a single entity dueling against its doppleganger. And Amadeus, himself breathless, cheeks ruddy with the raw blood of exaltation, declared Alek ripe for that privilege the Covenmaster offered only his most beloved and devout student.
And with those words he'd urged his best student to lie back helplessly on the Coventable. Alek had complied at once. Why shouldn't he? What had he to fear from the man who had saved his soul? The man he loved, the man he desired more than anything real or imagined that the world could offer him. And then came the touch of the master's mouth on his cheek, the delicate prick of a kiss under his chin. He remembered sweating in sudden panic, wary of those teeth and this passion and fearful that their relationship would change somehow and Amadeus would not seem the same to him afterward.
And yet once more the Father had shown patience with him, his touch deft and kind and passionate and fatherly. He'd been so foolish in his dread, Alek supposed, to fear a little innocent communion, the mingling of blood, and with it, minds. But the scars of his childhood had still been raw, in some places, still bleeding. Their relationship had changed after that, yes, had gone fathoms deeper, become a separate entity it almost seemed, as if they had breathed a living soul into it.
Amadeus held him down against the table, kissed the familiar mark in the hollow of Alek's throat, rasped it open with his sharp catlike tongue. Alek caught his breath and shivered, felt the Father's hand drift over his hammering heart as if he would catch the bird in its cage and calm it. "My beloved," Amadeus sighed, his tongue like cut glass against the wound. "More than anything ever before, more than anything will ever again be mine. My blood. My soul. My beloved." And now those teeth, primitive and long and deadly as sin, were in his acolyte's vein, and with every throb of Alek's rapidly beating heart, he could feel his master drinking, drawing nourishment from this chalice he knew so well, drawing life itself, and he found quite unexpectedly that he did not care that it might be killing him. At that moment life seemed nothing but a barrier standing between himself and the ultimate knowledge.
He reached out blindly and sent a cotillion of little animals scattering across the Abbey floor. He clasped something enormous and sweet and suffocating above him and held to it with both hands. His eyes were half-masted, running over, seeing the light of the candlelit wheel grow brighter with each passing, beating, bloodred moment, the supernova of heat branding his face like the tearfully white fury of the noontime sun in a summer sky in a land he knew not the name of while seeing with eyes that were not his own.
Amadeus. He must hold to Amadeus for whatever time they had now. He groaned inwardly. He wanted to die for Amadeus. He wanted to mourn for all they had, all they would never have, the lessons, the tomes of wisdoms, the words spoken inside their minds and out. On the midnight of his fourteenth birthday Amadeus had taken him to his first opera and made him sit unsquirming until it was over and he was in love with the Bohemian foreverafter. Then afterward, they'd gone to the country and found and bled a rabbit in an act of passion that Alek had thought never to share with his master. We are all of two minds, said the Father that night with absolute wisdom. Remember your lessons; they are the clay of your soul.
We are all of two minds.
Two minds...
Amadeus drew back, his tongue skating his bloodstained teeth as if to savor this gift. But it only made Alek feel sad and small. Of all the wards in the world that Amadeus had raised up in the Coven, the men and women, the eternal beings with their eyes full of holy fire, why him? Why was he special?
You were always in my dreams. I loved you before the founding of the Earth. I shall love you always.
"Always..." Alek echoed and watched in awe as the Father skated one long glasslike fingernail down over his own unscathed whiteness of throat, an invitation and a summoning. Take this and drink. For it is the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. Do this in memory of me, my love.
He dwelled in darkness as he rose up and kissed his master in sadness and reverence, even as that kiss deepened into blood and ceremony. He cleaved to darkness, a blind man, because in the dark he and Amadeus could be the same.
5
>From the very beginning of time her kind had had its rules, its holy commandments of conduct both with mortals and within the circle of its own kind. Perhaps once, in a time before recorded history, vampires had lived by their own simple code of ultimate freedom which might have been summed up in the phrases Do what thou wilt and Judge not lest ye be judged yourselves, but if so, it was a time long since passed. Her kind--When had it come so close to the surface of human existence?--had traded in such basic primal rights of predatory survival for the comforts of human companionship. Human responsibility.
Her blood, like so many of her kind, was mixed. Not greatly--not enough to dull the unique doll-like pallor of her face or change the chemical composition of her cells. Her eyes still burned under the fiercest of manmade lights. Her skin still singed at the touch of iron. But there were adaptations, minor evolutions, if you will. The "glamour" of being whatever her client wished was one such example. There were others. But the hunger: that remained, unchanged, in all its trembling, nail-biting fury, if nothing else.
"The fee," said the middle-aged communications conglomerate marketer down from Boston on business this weekend. He had claimed earlier at the Fox and Glass on Broadway that their latest venture was a combination of classical and avant-garde mus
ic his firm was hoping would catch on with the post-MTV crowd. Whether or not that was true was not her concern, though she let him talk. Whether or not he spoke the truth about himself was even less her concern.
"Let's not talk about that now," she muttered, her voice groggy with hunger. She could barely get out the words. It had been so long, so long. She'd held back, been a good girl for so many night, too many nights. And it was, after all, the middle of blue February, tonight the anniversary of the greatest death in her long life, and she celebrated it yearly with all the religious fervor of a pagan priestess on an equinox. "This is your night," she told him. "Your fantasy." She unzipped her motorcycle jacket. "Anything you want."
He told her his desire. His mortal blood was thundering through his veins. She could hear it from across the vast Marriott hotel room like a crest of water tumbling down and away, seething and boiling among the stones. What he wanted was not so unusual. Yet he spoke of it hesitantly. Most of the clients she'd met figured they've paid their money and they owned her for the evening. That they were entitled to do whatever the hell they liked. And they did. Or tried to. They just didn't understand what kind of asking price their requests come with. This man was different only in that he was an obvious novice. For him this would be his initiation into a life he had only ever dared dream about until now. Not since...since the time...she frowned...since the time his mother caught him with those skinrags under his mattress and beat him to within an inch of his life. Her frown leveled out to an impersonal smile. She slipped the links of chain off the catches on her jacket and bound him tight as a collared dog to the bedframe as she whispered innocuous little obscenities into his ear. By now his heart was triphammering at ever pulse point in his firm if aging flesh and making a sheen of sweat stand out like silk on his brow. If he was only a few years older she might fear he could suffer a coronary at any moment.
She licked his brow.
"I have protection," he murmured thickly, dispassionately, some final attempt at good sense before he plunged over into the rift of this new and exciting nightlife denied him for so long, too long.
She smiled. "I trust you."
"It's--no. For...me..."
She kissed his dry, chapped lips. She could feel his heart throbbing in her mouth, as if it had somehow been relocated there. She bit his lip until it bled and she could taste his wasted life on her tongue. "Don't worry," she said. "I have nothing you can catch."
He was oblivious. He reached for her, trying to slide his hands over her nakedness under the leather jacket, then his kisses. But she had lied. Tonight was not what he wanted. Tonight was what she needed. The death she celebrated.
She pulled away abruptly and heard his gasp, felt his body shudder as it reached instinctively for the soul drawing away from him. He looked disappointed by his failed fantasy. But for her there was no physical or spiritual pleasure in the act of sex, nothing but the unique sensation of life alive and throbbing and so near and open to her kiss and insatiable hunger that she had to swallow it whole and make it a part of her.
She moved slowly, tantalizingly, up his body, leaving the prints of her lips on his belly, his chest, his throat. Beneath her he lay as still as a corpse. She could tell he was trying to control himself, trying to be a good lover. Undoubtedly he had used the same technique for years as he waited patiently for his wife to reach some semblance of satisfaction. Tonight, however, all that wasn't necessary. There was no need to wait. She was ready for him, ready. She whispered painful little kisses over his flesh until there was no more resistance left in him, until he cried out, his body writhing beneath her, suddenly brought back to life. It was then and only then that she grasped his chin in her hand, turned his head sharply to the left, separating the most fragile of tiny bones and the long vital spinal cord, effectively rendering him paralyzed from the neck down, and gave him a razor blade vampire kiss.
"Paris," she whispered thickly through the flow of his crimson warmth.
Booker arrived just before noon the following day for their ritualistic midweek lunch date. Alek shrugged up from his easel at the sound of the well-tempered engine revving under his window and stretched, felt his spine crackle in a dozen little places. Just as well Book was here early; these primaries were going nowhere but in the circular file.
Alek grimaced at the forcefully erotic scratchy image of a nude holding forth an iron apple while tendrils--possibly electrical cables, he hadn't decided yet--trailed out and upward into a vast toothy skybound machine. Braxton would probably have a cow when he saw it, tell him how hackneyed it looked, and then he'd do his little J. Jonah Jameson-style fit and dance and pull his University Grant off the ticket. And it would be back to guiding yammering, camera-clicking, sticky-fingered tourists from the suburbs through the halls of the Metro for one, Mr. Alek Knight--a.k.a. The Washed-Up Modern Day Dali Of Our Time.
He shrugged. Too bad. Without a second look, he stripped off his wire-frames and pinched the bridge of his nose until the headache that had been forming behind his eyes for the past three hours passed. Then he reached for the black wool topcoat draped across the living room futon and headed downstairs and out the alleyside door. There Book waited, his Jag purring like a mechanical panther. Alek dropped into the passenger side and slammed the silent door hard enough to rattle the driver's side window.
"Do that again, will ya? I think you missed an axle or two."
"Sorry," Alek answered without remorse
Book shook his head with infuriating forgiveness. But then he was absolutely the most infuriating man in all the world--pressed to the nines, alert, ready to make a clod of Einstein with his next miracle of science--or otherwise out-charming all those ladies in those tight-ass Andy Warhol-inspired uptown cafes he frequented. He looked forever elegant, even in jeans. Alek despised him bitterly. He wore his denims and a tan London Fog this hazy afternoon, an aviator scarf swirled carelessly about his neck and camel-leather driving gloves on his tapering, long-fingered hands. The smell of hospital oils mingled with his spicy cologne.
He smiled apologetically and tugged at his pert little slayer's ponytail. "I've been in surgery since six this morning."
"Poor baby."
Book laughed. "The Panda?"
"Of course."
"You look like shitso."
"Why thank you, Doctor. Is that your professional opinion?"
With a dandy grin, Book put the car in gear and arrowed straight into Fifth Avenue traffic. Alek had known the man since they were eight years old, growing up with him in the Covenhouse, and he knew for a fact that Book's one weakness was a fast car. He had never endangered their lives, but he always made Alek feel as if they were finalist in the Indy 500. Book steered with his left wrist resting on the wheel, his right hand balanced on the eight-ball gear shift. His profile was marred by four streaks of flesh several shades lighter than his mahogany skin.
"Your cat?" Alek asked.
"That's what I'm telling everybody."
"What happened?"
"Bastard took me from behind." He reached up and pulled his scarf and turtleneck down. Alek spotted the throb of Book's pulse beneath the half-healed bite mark. It was going to leave quite a scar.
"Ouch."
"That's what I said." Book laughed. "Shoulda been there to hear what he said when I paid the fucker back for it."
Scars were a strange thing for his kind, since they faded away everywhere on their body but their necks, as if to serve as a reminder that they could lose their lives just as easily as their quarry. The oldest of their kind bore veritable colonies of bite and slash marks and postured them during Coven Circles like status symbols or badges of honor. Alek scratched absently at the mark in the hollow of his throat. Most of his own scars were deliberate, not accidents at all. Kisses from Debra, though Amadeus had done his best to conceal them.
"Maybe I'll finally get to show up those snobby elders next time the Father holds Circle, hey?" Booker said.
"Oh good, then you'll really ha
ve a scar."
Book laughed, tightened the scarf. Then he got serious. "Anyway, what's going on? I drop into the Covenhouse this morning to catch the buzz I missed last night--I mean, Perlman's playing Carnegie and how many times in a lifetime do you get to see that?--and there's Robot, y'know, just being spooky, and I tries to be friendly and he just about rips me a new asshole. And I was like What the fuck...?"
"Politics. I'll tell you after I get something in my stomach."
"Oh." He spun the car onto Hudson Street and slid into a parking slot moments ahead of a silver Ferrari. Alek swallowed down his heart and got out.
Cinnamon and soy weighed the air like incense as they walked shoulder to shoulder along the narrow sidewalk. Book's stomach growled. There were many Chinese restaurants in the Village, all of them good. The Panda Bear Paradise was particularly fine though because the chefs worked in a large open window where the patrons could watch them perform their alchemy. The waitresses too were a wonder, all of them outfitted in long black hair and red kimonos like lovely fallen angels. Intriguing. A Cantonese ballad tinkled overhead, and the warm scent of Hunan spices and steamed bamboo mingled with the hot cooking sake coming from the kitchen.
"Lawdy, am I hungry," Book complained.
"You're always hungry, brother."
"Hey, cut me some slack, brother. Some of us have real jobs, you know."
Alek gave him a friendly elbow.
A slender Oriental hostess grabbed two menus and held them to her chest. "Usual spot, Book?"
Slayer Page 5