Alek pulled himself up, weaving still a little, his arms steadying himself against the bedpost as the room slowed, then settled itself down properly. After a while he made himself walk off the nausea like a seasoned drunk might a hangover.
The morning light cast itself in unbroken, dusty banners on the booked western wall and picked out a volume here, there. Alek fingered the volumes as he went along, read the names. Calvin. Paracelsus. Chaucer. Pliny the Elder. Cornelias Agrippa. He pulled down a volume at random and felt its ancient weight in his hands. Volney's Ruins of Empires. He carried it with him under his chin like a schoolboy and circled the room twice before he stopped in front of the Colonial armoire. He took the armoire's little brass latch in his thumb and forefinger and gently pulled open the antique double doors. Gabardine habits were folded into dark uniform stacks on the shelves, the skins of a younger Alek Knight still here, as if he'd never grown up and went away from Amadeus House at all. As if a younger Alek Knight would walk in at any moment with his stack of study tomes and put on his glasses and one of the gowns before tackling the Father's lesson plan for the day.
Some fragile understanding, tenuous as a silk thread, fell in. And all at once he realized what being chosen of Amadeus truly meant. His was the only cell in the vast old house left unchanged, undisturbed, after all this time. Unused. Enshrined. As if Amadeus hadn't a doubt in his ancient mind that Alek would one day return forever.
Covenmaster, he thought.
Covenmaster Alek Knight.
He frowned, shook his head. Absently, he touched the mark on his throat. The wound had healed, yet it stung still.
He looked at the musty stack of habits and wondered if it was possible to slide into those skins of the past, now, almost thirty years later. And looking, his breath hitched softly, then died in a little sigh. His fingers came away from Amadeus's mark and inched into the armoire. Alek put Volney on the table behind him so that he was free to take the impish thing at the back of the armoire in both hands.
Raggedy Andy in his pale little face and faded blue sailor's uniform smiled up at Alek. He'd been Debra's once, a long time ago in a time of strife and confusion. Like the carousel and the cheap little gold ring hanging from the rusted chain around the doll's neck. Debra's. Wicked Debra's. He buried his nose in the red yarny hair, and yes, he could smell her still, feel the stickiness that time and handling had put into Andy's hair by childish fingers.
He slid the ring on the chain off the doll and tucked it into his pocket for no reason at all but that it seemed a good thing to do. Holding the doll still, he looked around the room, feeling all the fragile threads falling into him now, an enormous wed spun in years and distance, heavy with time and surely full of power.
"Coelum non animum mutant, que trans mare current."
The voice was like the gush of wind at his back.
Alek licked his mouth, his teeth. He closed his eyes. "`Those who cross the sea change the sky, not their spirits.' Horace. Epistles. I remember, Father."
"You forget nothing. Unlike so many."
Alek turned slowly, raised his eyes to the Father. "Why don't you simply kill him?"
Inside the casting of the door stood Amadeus like an ancient warrior prince, his face all chiseled ice, his loosened white hair trapped on the rough grain of the alabaster wall in a frosted web. Over his forearm was a Covenmaster's black silk habit. He stroked the length of fabric lovingly, like the hide of a great conquest. "Kill him. Kill the prophecy," he reasoned. "And would you do this for me, my best child? A single word from me and you would bend the catechism to preserve my life?"
Alek tightened his hold on the doll. "It is not in my power to destroy the boy, but Father, you've lived so long. You could summon the Vatican Council, reason with them--"
"Do you," Amadeus said with complete judgment, "believe I covet my life so that I would try and correct destiny like an Orpheus? Or manipulate my child like a human parent?"
Alek dropped his eyes.
"I would. I should--nein?--for my life is the Coven. But the Coven will live after me. Through you, my son. You will be the soul of the Coven in my stead. Do you see? My blood lives in you even now. We are wed. And I will live again after my own death, only it will be another face, another pair of hands and another heart beating, but beating the blood of Amadeus still."
"Immortality."
Amadeus nodded. "Yes, you see. You see best of all. Like a blind man sees."
Alek's mouth twisted against the tears and he tasted them in the back of his throat like bad liqueur. Immortality. But it was all only a bad joke. Immortality was for gods, and music, and legend, not the damned. Not for those whose heads could be removed and whose souls cast off the scales into hell.
Amadeus smiled. "Memento mori."
Remember that you must die. Ovid? Martialis? Alek couldn't remember. His mind was clotted with grief made all the worse because it could not be roundedly grasped yet for its lack of true presence, of arrival.
"Beloved, we are merely immortal. Not eternal," said the Father. "You too must one day die."
Raggedy Andy fell through Alek's fingers and hit the floor dustily. Of course he would die one day. They would all die. Like Debra had died. Like the thousands they'd slain had died on a thousand other nights and like thousands more still would.
"You doubt," said Amadeus.
"I fear."
"The weight of this--"
"--will crush me."
"Der Unsinn," said Amadeus. "Do you remember the night I found you in the park, holding to your sister, afraid even to speak? You were in my visions long before. As a child I saw you standing at the gateway to the stars in your black hair and bloodied steel. The Chosen. I was led that night to you. Drawn to you. Drowning in love for you. My journey's end."
Andy smiled up at Alek, demure, a tease who knew all the answers. Alek crossed his arms, almost shuddering. "It's morning," he said and his voice sounded curiously empty to himself, as if like the past and the things in it, coming from a long way's away. But here now. Arrived. "I have to go now, Father. Braxton will be up my ass, my studio's a goddamn mess, I--"
Amadeus touched his cheek.
Alek flinched and looked up. He hadn't perceived that the man had even moved. "It is the morning of your ascension, my most beloved," Amadeus said, his fingers melting against the thin bones of Alek's face as if he would mold them as everything else.
Master...my dear sweet Creator, Alek thought helplessly as Amadeus's fingers fell down over his eyelashes and down farther to the mark on his throat. And then his lips were there, briefly, making Alek's skin shiver alive with the familiar intimacy of it. We are the most important part of each other, he thought with serene wisdom. He's right; we're married to each others' destiny. Never before, he wanted to say, never before have I felt this. But in the end he did not, for he knew it was a lie.
"Finish your affairs in the world this day," said Amadeus. "Gather yourself and the things most you value. I give you today. And then you will come to me at midnight in your faith and your loyalty and I will give you the Dominatio, and it will be my greatest act. Verstehen?"
Alek shuddered within and without. Dominatio. To absorb another vampire's soul through the ultimate partaking of blood--to become that person, to let that person become you. For a moment his whole being rebelled against the concept. So much so, that he almost shied away from the Father's touch.
But the Father was patient, as always. "Do you trust me, mein Sohn?'
"You know I do. It's just--"
"I shall recede."
Again he shuddered, but this time in mind-numbing horror. Recede in the Dominato. To let one's soul die...
Alek held his master's eyes.
Amadeus smiled as he pressed the habit into Alek's hands, and when his voice came a moment later it had no fear, purred, in fact, with perfect fulfillment, the finish of a promise too long denied. "Go now," he said, "yet return to me, my beautiful slayer."
Alek nodded and t
urned to leave his cell, to do as the Father had requested of him. But in the end he faltered, one foot upon the threshold, and turned back abruptly. Desperate. Was there any way to show this man his grief? Amadeus. Father, brother, his best friend in all the world. He would never know how much his child wanted to die for him. But because he could not, because it was not his time to die, Alek only returned to his master and kissed him, a gift and a covenant.
Then he left.
"Mister Knight?"
He'd been watching the girl on the street corner for almost twenty minutes. Punishing heels and phony bloodred hair lying limp and cold on her leathered shoulders. A wood crucifix at her throat. One of the children of Adam gone to darkness and running. A child of the night now, though her black mascaraed eyes would not shine in the dark and she would not live forever. Perhaps a few months on the brutal back of this devouring city. No more than that. Somebody's daughter. Sister, even.
The girl posed for a passing john in a blue sports car and Alek noticed that beneath the girl's cheap rhinestone-encrusted jacket her thin, cold little dress was red. Red.
Debra's color had been red.
But Debra was gone--
"Mister Knight?"
He let the chintzy curtain fall back over the window and wandered back across the studio to the galley where Eustace was helping him pack boxes. Not that he needed the help, mind you. All the important things he'd managed to collect outside the Coven would probably fit into half a dozen suitcases. The rest the new owners of this hole could have, the evil green sofa and the Formica and cinderblock coffee table some SoHo residents called shabby chic industrial, the card tables and the faded bedsheets and the rest of the mess he'd managed to make of his human life.
He looked at the few things of importance here, his tools of the trade, easels and canvas stretchers--and the pair of commas he'd never learned to use. The ring he slid onto his first finger. Maybe sad, all this, he mused to himself, watching the tarnished gold flash in the harsh overhead light, but then, what were possessions but chains to bind a soul to earth when he might fly--?
Fly with me, Alek, please?
Debra. Her voice. Her plea from so long ago.
He closed his eyes. Begone, Debra, he prayed. Torment me no longer. He waited, hoping breathlessly for the voice to fade, then let out a long sigh of relief as her special laughter eddied away into darkness inside him.
His eyes ached as if with headache and he felt a strange, lagging sense of disorientation. He looked again at the ring, tried to twist it off, but now it was stuck, damnit.
"Mister Knight, sir?"
His blinked and the undeparted faraway feeling cracked at the edges. Shaking away the remnants, he regarded the debris of his life scattered across the counters and the tall young man placing it all with such gentle reverence into brown boxes.
Trying to make points with the new authority, a cynical part of his mind whispered, though he knew for certain it wasn't the truth. Eustace just wanted to please. He was simply too damned honest and too damned simple to have any subterranean devices.
"What's this, Mister Knight?" he asked as he held up an object.
"Alek, please."
"What's this, Mister Alek?"
He smiled, took it from the boy's hand. "Tortillion," he explained and brushed the rubber tip against the boy's nose. "You use it to rub lead into the grain of the paper for a better blending of values."
"Laws," said Eustace, taking it back and observing it like a newly discovered species of otherworldly life. "Don't got nothing like that in Morningvale. Why do you get better value mixing lead with grain?"
Alek shook his head, almost amused. "I'll teach you sometime. Like to draw, son?"
"Sure. Houses and horses and things. Whatta these?"
Alek reached across the island and took the shabby deck of cards from him. "Tarot. They tell the future. Sometimes. Though not for me. A friend gave them to me in the summer of `69. Everyone was into it back then." He riffled the cards, came up with the High Priestess, the conceiver of mystery. Truth be known, he seldom consulted the Tarot; the cards never seemed prepared to reveal anything of any real importance. It was almost as if they knew him for what he was and resented the fact that to tell his future would occupy them for far too many years.
He scowled over the top card, one finger ringing the High Priestess's portrait with her casually juggled moons and stars. All wrong. When he'd split the deck he'd anticipated the face card of the Hermit to embody the new position he would be entering into tonight--at the very least the Hanged Man for his act of surrendering his professional life, such as it was, to a priest's order. The cards were probably as muddled as ever. He set them in a box. Useless things...
He squinted as his mind swelled suddenly with the dark shadow of laughter and a promise of grief. Of revenge. Debra would do anything if it meant returning to him to wreck her vengeance, anything at all. He felt her hands on him, he felt his own heartbeat in his left hand, he felt--
Eustace spoke his name with some concern but he scarcely heard the boy. He had to drown that fucking little-girl laughter, drown it before it drove him insane. He went to the cupboard and poured himself a three-finger whiskey, downed it too quickly and scorched his mouth raw. He threw the glass tumbler into the sink and watched in satisfaction as it cracked into a dazzling rain of false diamonds.
He laid his forehead to the cupboard door and moaned. Sean was right. He was coming apart. Tipped. Hmm. Some Covenmaster. He wanted to weep, almost thought it would help, but he knew from too much experience that his tears might fall forever but they would bring with them no relief or release.
"Mister Alek...Mister Alek, you look badly ill."
He shook his head. Carefully. There was an abrupt, sullen ache like a stab wound in his left temple. He touched it meditatively. Migraine. Half-head. Come to me, he pleaded. Please, come and destroy me or else go and leave me in peace...
But Debra remained an ambient ghost, always prepared to torture him but forever beyond his reach and command. Fool. He was a damned fucking fool to believe he could summon her. Debra, wicked Debra. In life she'd been an unbound vampiress the likes of which even Amadeus could not hold back. But in death she was a goddess. Why did he try?
Vermouth. White Horse. Wormwood for the brain. Anything was better than this madness.
He tried to twist the ring, failed. Felt like it was fucking soldered onto his hand. He wished he'd never found it or that damned doll. I should throw `em off the top of this building, he thought. Or maybe the Empire State. Yeah, that'll work. He lifted the amber bottle and saw with horror that it was empty. When had this happened? It had been half-filled only a moment ago. He looked at it long and hard as if the image would change suddenly like an optical illusion. But the bottle remained stubbornly empty. And his headache was worse, so much worse.
Female laughter crested in his head, as rusty as hellish old bells.
It hurt so bad.
He was supposed to go to Amadeus as a priest in just a few hours and there was no hair of the dog to make him right. He was all pain, all laughter, all bones and hair and ragged fabric like a doll with faulty craftsmanship. Amadeus would touch him and he would simply fall to skeletal pieces like a smashed jigsaw, his pieces scattered across the length of the Abbey like the fragments of the tumbler at the bottom of the rust-yellow sink.
"Oh fucking hell..." He turned around and checked the time. The clock over the sink was only now plodding toward ten. He had time to visit Sam's Place, and if he did not he would make time. He dropped the bottle into the sink and swayed past Eustace and his studio and all the fucking repulsive Bosch jobs hanging from the fucking repulsive walls, all the women with black steel cable hair and the machines eating their makers, and if this didn't make him right, God help him, nothing would.
"Mister Alek?"
He paused partway up the hill and looked back down at the Village. What once had seemed quaint and glowing and as opulent as stained glass only loo
ked tired and defeated. Overindustrialized.
Industry, that's all it was--empty and echoless and inhabited by minds as flat as those of store mannequins. Urbanized industrial rich. No sun. No night. No inspiration. He realized with something close to panic that he was stuck in the middle of the very fucking thing he'd once looked upon as a parentless child and abhorred. It was no wonder he could no longer paint. How the hell had this happened?
"Mister Alek...wait up!" called Eustace as he came loping up the street and took him by the arm. "Where're you going, Mister Alek?"
"An errand."
"Can I come?"
"No."
"Please?"
"No."
"I'll be real quiet, I pr--"
"No! I said no! Are you on stupid pills?"
Eustace jerked. His eyes were young and afraid.
Fucking lunatic, what had he done? Alek reached out, carefully, and gathered the boy under his arm. This was no good. What was wrong with him? What the hell was going on? "I'm sorry, son," he said. "I--"
He paused. He felt it first in his back, and then a rush in his neck and jaw. Something coming their way. Down that alley across from them. He looked at Eustace. Eustace only looked back. He was innocent. No blood there. He and Book would be getting together pretty soon, but Alek didn't think he needed to ask how it had gone the other night. Dairy Queen, obviously.
"Wait here," he said and crossed the street to where a pair of crumbling tenement buildings stood side by side, so close their ornate stone cornices nearly necked.
Dark here. While waiting for his eyes to adjust he drew his katana, brought it up under his forearm into the ready-strike position. Paranoia? But of course. Vampires were especially capable of vendettas. He felt for the presence with his mind, sensed its retreat. Oh no you don't, he thought. You're following me and I'm just in the mood for you tonight!
He stepped into the alley, felt the presence retreat all the way to the back. Useless. This alley, like the majority of the Village alleys, were flat dead ends. He sidled against one wall and stalked the creature slow, his feet making no sound on the dirty asphalt. Deftly he avoided the stacked boxes and mounds of refuse scattered down the throat of the alley. A rat scrabbled loose from one mound of garbage and skittered between his feet to reach the next. He ignored it. His eyes narrowed, crawled over the darkness and the rearing graffiti-covered city walls.
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