"No."
"Nein? Is there another destiny?" His hand instinctively found the mark of Teresa's kiss at his throat. Slowly, with excruciating attention to detail, he raked that mark into discord with the tips of his talonlike fingernails. Alek gasped and let his breath out in a whine of eye-watering pain. "Her? You would leave me and the Coven for a bit of willing flesh?" Alek's skin tore like paper and sent a new freshet of blood running down his neck and into the collar of his shirt. Amadeus spoke but his words were oddly alien in Alek's ear, like endearments spoken in some foreign language, sweet and distant and full of hidden truths.
"No, no--we are destined, you and I, two halves of a single creature. I have seen our destiny and it is set in the ages of the earth. Let this be our time, beloved. Let this be our stage. You shall be my vessel as you were born to be. Only a moment, Alek. One moment in hell. A covenant and a kiss. This is all I ask of you."
The kiss Amadeus gave him seemed to steal the remaining breath from Alek's lungs, and yet even as his vision reddened and he wondered it he wouldn't simply pass out from the shock and loss of blood Amadeus pulled his stinging mouth away, pushed Alek's face to the side, his lips brushing like fire along Alek's ear and down farther still, following the shining track of blood Alek could imagine glittering black on his whiteness of throat. Meanwhile he felt Amadeus's hand under his shirt and against his chest, branding him there like an iron, and he lifted his head, or tried to, as if to catch a glimpse of the heart that wanted to leap from the cage of his ribs and into his master's hands.
Amadeus was growling now, growling in the back of his throat, and Alek felt a white-hot flash of panic. For gone was any trace of the sophisticated teacher and weaponsmaster who had taught him all he knew. In its place was a rapacious animal who could kill him if he chose and would do so with his bare hands. Amadeus kissed the wound he had made on his throat, kissed it again. Alek felt the teeth pierce the ruptured skin of the wound and he gasped, shuddered with the roaring ache of utter violation, yet his pain did nothing to slake Amadeus's hunger, nothing at all, and Alek screamed.
He screamed in outrage, fear and pain.
He screamed for Akisha lying dead on the floor at his feet.
He screamed for his lost innocence.
He screamed for the life left behind and he screamed for the life that had never been his.
He screamed, at last, for the soul he had lost to this beautiful and evil man.
And Amadeus, even powerful Amadeus with all his strengths and powers, was forced to give up, thrown from his work by the nauseatingly shrill cry of horror in his ear. Alek pitched forward to the floor at the foot of the chair and twisted around in time to see Amadeus charging him, the katana in his hands. He moved out of the way just in time, the blade whistling inches from his left ear and sinking solidly into the drywall behind him. Alek lurched against the desk and scrabbled to his feet, squaring off to face the master. Amadeus's face was contorted into something subhuman by his rage, the words barely audible as they spilled from his slathing, venomous mouth,
"Whelp! Judas! Whore! I will kill you after all! I will kill you as I was always supposed to!" And with one monumental wrench, he pulled the sword free of the wall.
Alek had stuttered in his decision to go for Amadeus. He had failed and failed miserably, failed in a way that there were no second chances. But he would not beg for mercy, not that Amadeus would show him any. There was no going back now, no apologies, nothing to be done about the past. He had won and he had lost, but he refused to give the Coven the satisfaction of seeing his sniveling greed for life. There was only one thing he still had in his power--to die as he might have lived. Free, with the strength of his own repentance.
"You want to kill me?" Alek screamed back, hating the sight of Amadeus, hating the sight of him and himself reflected in his mentor so much so that he decided in that moment to do anything, even die, to escape it. The game was almost over. There was no way he could fight and destroy the master. "You want to kill me, Father?" he repeated and spread his arms out to the sides in Christlike submission. "You hate me so much and you want to kill me? Then kill me."
He sank to his knees before the Father, folding his bloody hands before him as if in prayer, head bowed to accept the killing blow. Above him loomed the Covenmaster, his aura blazing with hatred, but it was hatred frozen with incredulity. He could hardly believe his best student was giving up so easily, walking voluntarily into his own destruction. The sword sliced downward and into Alek's left shoulder, almost staggering him down on his face, but Alek quickly regained his balance, gritting his teeth against the searing hot blow meant to stun, to punish, not kill. Not yet.
Amadeus withdrew the katana, the blade scraping shrilly against Alek's collarbone like fingernails on a blackboard. "I don't hate you," he said at last.
Alek looked up. The Father was backing away as if afraid of this odd act of submission. The look of incredulity he expected was being replaced by something else, something akin to sorrow. Righteous rage. "Don't even say I hated you!" he spat. "I risked everything for your godforsaken soul! Everything!"
"You took everything from me!"
"I had to make you pure! I had to convince them..." Amadeus shook his head in dismay. He looked around, almost as if he could not understand how they could be here now, having this conversation. How everything could have gone so horribly wrong overnight.
"Who?" Alek ventured, his heart ramming wildly against his ribs. "Who? The church?" But when no answer was forthcoming he rose slowly to his feet and tried to maneuver as inconspicuously as possible around the desk where Akisha's shirasaya lay undisturbed by the chaos. "Is that it? That's it, isn't it? Teresa's right. This--it's all about the fucking church!"
Amadeus shook his head.
"It's about the plan. The Purge."
Amadeus's eyes snapped to attention and Alek knew then, knew for sure, that he was right. Teresa was right.
Alek spoke the words he thought. "You--Aragon--you betrayed Paris--all the other vampires--for the church. You made a deal with them, didn't you? Didn't you?"
The Covenmaster's silence and indecision was acquiescence enough. Amadeus lowered the sword to his side. He seemed to know the charade was over, all the masks gone. He closed his eyes and said, "Alek, beloved, know that--that everything I did, I did for love."
"Love? The word rots on your tongue!"
Amadeus ignored the outburst. "Where is the Chronicle?"
"I don't know."
"You know."
"I don't know! No one does! Byron did, but you killed him." He swallowed down a sob as the claustrophobic walls of too many memories pressed into him like a collapsing tomb. "You killed him," he said again. "And Debra. Only they knew..."
The Father's simmering white eyes opened. "Do not pursue this, my whelp. Please..."
"I have to!" Alek shouted, shuddered, caught a glance of the shir out of the corner of his eye. Maybe if he could just get ahold of it, maybe in the Father's present state of angst, maybe...maybe he would have half a chance in hell at life. If he could get there, if he could keep the Father off-balance long enough. He said, "Teresa, Paris--they believed the church was going to destroy us, all of us. Like in the Inquisitions. Like that. And any deal you cut isn't going to be worth shit when they get what they want."
"Teresa lies. And you don't know the church--"
"The Chronicle is proof! Or why would you be here now? Who sent you? Your masters from the church?" He put his hand upon the desk. He shook his head. "It doesn't matter. Maybe the Chronicle can protect us--maybe it'll change everyone's idea of what's going on. But when the church gets it again it's over for all of us, you blind bastard. You, me, anyone you're protecting." Alek let out his breath, almost a sob. He was so close, close enough to smell the steel of the blade. "We're all marked, all our race. And the humans will be the slayers then, they'll--"
Amadeus rushed forward, his eyes frenzied. He slapped Alek across the face, gripped him by the sh
oulders and pulled him forward. "The church protects me and I protect you. I always have!"
Alek spat in his master's face. "I don't want your protection!"
The mad, holy expression on the Covenmaster's face shattered like panes of glass. He slapped his disciple again and this time the momentum of the blow cast Alek against Akisha's desk with all the terrible force of a bird struck down from its perch by a cat's paw.
Alek shuddered from the blow, caught himself, steadied himself, gripped the edge of the desk for purchase. He shook himself. His face stung as if the flesh had been peeled from the bone. He tried to tell himself that the Father was misguided, a thrall of the church, a victim like them all, but he knew that wasn't true. Amadeus was just lost. And this would not be the last time. Amadeus would hit him again and again. Amadeus would hit him until his will was as broken as his body and he would do anything, say anything, the Father wanted. Anything the church wanted. Because a ward of Amadeus was forever...
Through a veil of tears, Alek saw the shirasaya lying on the ink blotter of Akisha's desk. He reached for it--then yanked his hand back compulsively as Amadeus's blade hissed by a mere inch from Alek's hand, leaving a long gash in the blotter and an even deeper groove in the wood of the desk. Alek stood back, the desk between them, and tried to decide what to do before Amadeus--
"Akisha?"
Both slayers turned toward the third voice at once. Akisha's girl was on her hands and knees on the floor beside her lover's body. She must have emerged from her dreamplace on Akisha's death and was staring down at the bloody remains of the mistress in wide-eyed, childish confusion. As if she could not understand how something so immortal could now be so dead. "Akisha?" came the girl's tiny, plaintive voice again. And then her expression broke. "Akeeeeshaaaa..."
It was all the distraction Alek needed. He grabbed up the shirasaya, liberating it from the scabbard and pointing the savage weapon at Amadeus like a quivering finger. "I'm not going back. I won't go back with you!"
Amadeus stood a moment indecisively. And then he laughed. He spread his arms, and in his coat and suit of rude wool clothes he looked absurdly like Jonathan Edwards about to sermonize the American Separatists into hell. "Futile, this. How can you win against the enemy who lives inside your head, who knows your devices even as you do. Remember, beloved, it is my blood you have in your veins. That shall never go away. I will be a part of you forever."
He drifted around the desk and toward his wayward acolyte like some horrible, earthbound spirit.
Alek made a sickened, strangling noise. "Don't..."
Amadeus stopped and narrowed his eyes. "You belong to me."
"I don't. I belong to Debra."
"Debra is dead."
"Sometimes the dead come back."
Amadeus swayed closer, put out a long white hand to caress his hair as though to challenge him to do this--to strike his master and teacher. Alek blinked, and for just a moment Amadeus's figure transfigured into something looming and monstrous and shadowy and disfigured, something not of this world, something that had never belonged to it, something unnatural and hideous to behold--
Alek shuddered, groaned at the contact, and thrust the shirasaya forward through the cage of his master's ribs and up into Amadeus gut with all his sudden strength of panic, up, up further, all the way in, burying the longsword in his master all the way up to the simple rosewood hilt--
And halted.
Amadeus's expression remained unblemished by either surprise or agony. Alek saw no defeat there, nothing that could be hurt, could die. Only the prowling rage of something inhuman and unstoppable, petty and rejected. And in that single, still moment of absolute crux, Alek found himself thinking of, not Teresa nor even Debra or Akisha cooling on the floor not a dozen steps away, but of the Prince of swans falling on his ice and dying.
Why must the heroes always die?
"Damnable," Amadeus said. "Damnable whelp. I am finished with you. Go to your sister, Alek. Now."
Amadeus grabbed the sword just behind the pommel and jerked it unhesitantly out of the gaping hole in his gut and drove the hilt into Alek's stomach. Alek barely felt it as he careened over Akisha's desk and hit the Plexiglas pane of the office window behind it. The glass shuddered, shrieked, struggled to maintain its reputation--only a second--then gave it up.
After that there was only the hands of the wind and the sickening vertigo of a four-hundred foot plunge to the city floor below. He felt the wind animate his coat like the tattered wings of a great bat, and that made him wish in some final moment of utter desperation that he really could change as the stories and movies professed, shrink into a different creature with membranous wings that could cup and hold the wind and make him fly. Really, truly fly. At last, at long last--
But then he gave up the fantasy and let the darkness have him and hide him and take him down into a place after which no one could follow him.
15
The holiday season was always marvelous at McEnroy Home, with baskets of donated goodies, and shopping sprees and outings arranged by the affluent. At eight years of age, Alek enjoyed the time of the year immensely, the theatre and carnival, the colored lights and the tinkling laughter and the warmth the city briefly embraced.
Especially wonderful were the outings when they toured someplace magic and perfect; it was a chance to feel clever and take Debra by the hand and lead her down through the sacred halls of the museums he read so much about and see the Masters of Old Europe and the timeless gods with beast's heads in their upright, airtight glass coffins. A chance to hunt down and study marvelous quarry constructed of oils and bronze and marble and light.
"Sekhmet," Debra said once in The Hall of Gods and pointed up at the lion-headed goddess. "Battlequeen. She killed her enemies without mercy and drank their blood." Debra lingered over the statue, but Alek moved on quickly, eyes averted, because the clever feline grin on Sekhmet's whiskered face was so like Debra's own.
They saw Daumier and Delacroix and Matisse's white-plumed ladies. And Alek stood spellbound before the splattering bloodlike oils of Jerome Bosch, fearing and admiring the images that spoke without moving, those secrets whispered without words.
Afterward, the class was ushered to Rockefeller Center as if they were expected to mingle with the children who came with parents and would leave with them. The McEnroy children, uniform in their grey, state-issued greatcoats, skated between boys in letter jackets and girls in flared, candy-pinked tulle skirts, all of it mother-chosen affectations to carefully define character in their children. And the Home children all grey-coated and incongruous, Alek thought, all but Debra. Of course.
As Alek watched, his sister crept up to the benches where the doting parents sat watching the expensive clothing their children had discarded in the warm rush of their expended energy and stole a young teenaged boy's black leather jacket almost right out from under the nose of his father. She smiled and swirled across the ice toward him in her red holiday dress and black jacket as the other Home children looked on with horror and pointed at her. "You can't do that," Alek chided her as she linked her hand through his.
She laughed. Her lips looked moist. "Why?"
"Because."
"Damn because! Don't be such a Puritan, Alek!" She broke away and ran for the center of the pond where she executed a series of death-defying off-the-ice flips and landed on her feet like a cat with a cat's same wicked pride.
Alek watched her antics from a bench, enjoying them and her. He did not understand her thoughts many times, and sometimes could not guess at her intentions, but she was beautiful and clever and he would love her forever, so what did anything else matter?
He smiled and settled back on the bench to watch her creep up like a ghost and steal a link of candy from the pocket of another of the Home children. And it was then, when he was most preoccupied and off-guard, that he felt his hackles stiffen as a melodious whistling drifted to him from behind. A flock of pigeons scattered as the Bitch appeared on the g
ravel walk in front of Alek's bench. She was bundled stupidly, like some German female spy in a war movie, with muffs on her scrawny hands and little black Gestapo glasses on her pasty face. Smiling, she ambled by in her dark coat as if expecting some secret rendezvous. Alek held his breath and waited. Maybe the Bitch hadn't noticed his presence amidst all the other children, or no longer cared. Maybe she had a new victim.
But after a long, silent, unbreathing moment Alek felt the hiss of a released breath in his hair, felt a raw, knuckled hand brush his cheek briefly then settle itself like a spider on his shoulder. Alek heard a helpless whimper gather in his throat. Was there anywhere safe? Anywhere at all? He closed his eyes tight; he wanted to go away, run away with Debra right this minute...
And then, as if summoned, he opened his eyes and spotted his sister skating toward him, hands in her pockets, eyes narrow slits, her posture casual and yet like that of a stalking beast, and the hand quickly disappeared. He sobbed as she settled on the bench beside him, sobbed into her hair, quite surprised with himself, and she held him and allowed for it. And Debra kissed the tears from his face and spoke her savage words of love into his mind, and she seemed so beautiful and angelic to him that he feared what she would become.
Somewhere far off at the other end of the pond a group of Home children had joined a group of wasslers in their songs, and it was then that he remembered how Debra was to be fostered out to the Forsythes for Christmas this year and how they must be apart, and the fear was hard, red as life itself inside him, and he wondered if it would crack his very soul open...
"My beloved," she whispered, her voice soft and strong like the sultry voices of the movie actresses she so wanted to be like, but with more truth than any actress, more feeling. "We will always be together. Don't you know? Wherever you are I can see and protect you. I adore you and will love you forever." She kissed him and held him close, and between them, on the chain around her neck where she had hung it, he could almost feel the warm gold magic of the ring.
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