Alek woke sharply to the shadow-deep night of the Home at midnight. Through the window he could see a moon the color of steel hanging like a weapon in the heavens and casting light in a runner to the foot of his bed. He looked at the moonlight, the warm glow of it, and thought of Debra, Debra in her black coat and blacker hair, how the moon always caught red in the pits of her eyes. It was Christmas Eve, and Debra was gone now to Ithaca with the Forsythes so they could play house and feel pious for the season, damn them. He hoped she ate their dog.
He turned over in bed and pillowed his head on his folded arms. He studied the waterstain on the ceiling above his bed, imagining ghoulish faces that could frighten the Forsythes and the social workers and all the other people in the Home who conspired to separate them. He hated them all with the deepest part of his heart and soul and more.
And he had just started wondering if that was all right, to hate everyone so completely, when he thought he heard a whippoorwill shrill somewhere in the city that cowered in the night. Whippoorwill. Someone's dying, Debra would say.
Except it wasn't.
It was...whistling
He sat bolt upright. And all at once he felt the quiet of the Home smother him like a great faulty web falling in, like a dirty blanket, like that, or something worse. He should get out of here, he knew, get help, except there were no hall monitors at this time of the night and most of the staff were gone for Christmas. A handful of kids without foster homes like himself slept safe in their beds in other rooms, but that was so far away. Far away. Like Debra was far away. He was alone, he realized. Completely alone.
The whistling deepened, drew nearer.
His heart throbbed painfully in his chest. It was difficult to think, to even feel. He shivered violently all over and found moist diamonds of sweat sparkling on the backs of his hands. He should rise and go to the window, escape into the night the way he and Debra did on countless other nights. Except his body felt paralyzed and alien to him and all he could do was shudder and sweat and chant Debra's name over and over again like a mantra or a prayer for deliverance.
He felt his heart die and his body seize up when the door of his room clicked open. He wasn't moving, only fearing, fearing something new and horrible and somehow inevitable. Maybe it was only a late-night bed check by the director of the Home, he thought, staring with wide, horrified eyes at the monstrous and alien shadow eating up the wall, something hideous and unnatural to behold. Maybe if he held perfectly still and didn't say a thing, maybe then he wouldn't be noticed, maybe--
The door closed silently but with great force, like a seal, locking him in with this thing now.
And Alek stopped shuddering completely like someone had turned a switch off inside of him. Instead he found himself reaching beside his bed for one of the sketch pencils in the tin cup on the nightstand. He drew it close to him and buried it under his bedclothes.
The presence glided toward him and settled in the dark at his bedside. Alek did not look, did not flinch even when the dry, ugly hand touched his hair. Don't panic, he told himself--Debra's earliest lesson when they first began to hunt at night and he was so afraid of being caught. Never panic. Panic gets you caught.
"Pretty little blackbird."
"I'll tell." He felt surprised that he could still speak. "I'll scream until they come. I swear it."
The hand on his face, as dead and rotten as the hand of a movie mummy's, dropped to his collar, then ripped the buttons violently from the front of his nightshirt. "And if you make them come, I'll tell them about all the nights I saw Alek and Debra Knight run away and kill animals and drink their blood. I'll tell them all about the bloodstained and torn clothing that disappears and the dirt and blood under your fingernails, and if they don't believe me, I'll show them the evidence. And do you know what they will do to you, Alek? They'll take you both and put you in a place for mad kids because they don't understand, and then they'll split you up and you will never see your sister again."
"Liar! I don't believe you!" he heard himself whisper vehemently.
"I don't care if you do." The hand, the terrifying hand, slid caressingly down Alek's body beneath the open shirt, and he shivered. "How cold you are," the Bitch complained. "As cold as the dead."
Alek shuddered inside and out. It was all he could do to keep from thinking about her words. "What...what do you want?"
The bed groaned as it took on weight. The hand played over his face, yet he felt no instinct to flee just yet, no need to panic. He only tightened his hold on the pencil under his covers.
"You're a vampire," said the Bitch, as simple as a fact. Her mouth gleamed as she spoke. "Did you know you'll be beautiful and young and powerful forever, Alek? Do you know how wonderful it will be for you? Do you have any idea of what promise the world holds for you?"
No, Alek wanted to tell her, to scream, no it's not wonderful or promising. It's horrible. It's confusing. What they were, whatever it was, was like being locked inside a black box with no light and no air, and they had to keep going, keep living, even though they knew it would probably never end. And the most horrible part of it was that there was a part of them that was real and human, but they'd abandoned it once too often and now they couldn't seem to reach it anymore. They lived inside a black canvas like a Bosch they couldn't take themselves out of and they looked out on a bright, beautiful world that wasn't really theirs anymore, and sometimes that made him want to weep until he was carried away on a river of his sorrow...
He wanted to say these things, because they were true and because they hurt and they might wound Bessell, but his voice was constricted now with his suddenly rediscovered panic.
"I want to be like you," the Bitch whispered. She leaned close, close, breath cloying. "I want to be a vampire. Make me into one. I want to hunt at night with you and be a part of your world. Take me, Alek. Bite me and take me with you and I promise to serve you forever. I swear it."
But...but he couldn't! He didn't know why this had happened to them--or how--but it had, and they hadn't been made by anyone, and the animals they killed only died and stayed that way, just like the Bitch would...
"Please, Alek. I don't want the life that's chosen for me. I want to make my own choices, I want to live my own life. I want--so many things. Strength. Power. Immortality. Make me a vampire and I'll be your disciple," the Bitch whispered. "I will join you, learn from you, help you--"
The Bitch's weight was heavy on him then, crushing his ribs, the hands hot and filthy on his skin, and the panic was there again--wild and instinctual--and Alek turned away his face, half to gag and half to sob, but with his head turned he felt the slimy, yellowed teeth at his throat and something broke inside him, something massive and snarling, and in one movement his hand came up under the sheet and he felt the pencil sink into soft, warm, ponderous flesh and splinter off, and after that there was only dead weight and the Bitch's wet scream muffled against Alek's throat, and suddenly the weight upon him was not so terrible, and Alek gathered himself and pushed out with every ounce of strength he had and watched, satisfied, as Bessell grunted and the force of it actually cast her over the foot of the bed to crash against the highboy beside the window, the side of the Bitch's head connecting with it with a hearty thump and the woman slamming to the floor just below the window and the bladelike quarter moon.
Alek shook himself to rid himself of the Bitch's touch and crawled to the foot of the bed and looked down. Wilma Bessell lay in a massive lump on the floor. A little blood trickled from just below her ribs where the pencil had gashed her, and there was an angry red area over one temple, but her breathing was deep and normal. He hadn't killed the woman, thank God.
God had nothing to do with it.
Alek looked up at the window.
Debra teetered on the outer sill, smiling in at him. The snow was a rain of knives out there, and yet she crouched in only her thin red camisole and black leather jacket, her feet bare, lassos of her wet black hair lashed across her face and ne
ck like the long arms of spiders. She tapped at the glass expectantly and Alek wasted no time and went to her immediately and swung open the pane for her lithe entry. "Debra," he said, but she corrected him, saying, "Sekhmet, beloved," and danced out of his hold to study the brained Bitch at her feet.
"She wants to be a vampire," Alek explained, feeling sad and sick and a little afraid.
"The stupid cow, does she now?" Debra smiled strangely at him, her eyes black and shiny as wet leather. She clucked her tongue over the Bitch's body. "Only two to an establishment, I'm afraid," she said very tragically and knelt down beside the woman, indicating that Alek should join her. And as Alek watched, paralyzed with horror, his twin kissed the Bitch's forehead, then withdrew a delicate little straight razor from the pocket of her coat and slit the soft pouch of flesh under the Bitch's chin from one ear to the other. The flesh split away from the great vein like a pair of open gaping lips.
The Bitch moaned, shuddered once, and was silent forever.
The blood was astonishing. It painted the walls of their white room like a picture of abstract poinsettias. It painted Alek and it painted his twin in its cloying, metallic sweetness. It did not seem possible a single person could have so much blood in them. Debra laughed playfully and put her tongue to the gush of warmth like Alek had seen other children put their tongues to water fountains in the park. Debra drank in greedy, starving gulps, and when she looked up at him, her face was red out of which glowed only the feral blackness of her eyes, eyes shot through with sad, heckling laughter and the madness of her life.
Debra licked her lips clean and Alek felt his paralysis break. He felt himself sink inside at the sight, almost blacken out. And knowing now, knowing why they'd been left on the doorstep of the Home eight years ago by a nameless, faceless individual who had obviously seen the shadows behind their eyes, but who had not had the heart for proper murder. Knowing now, knowing the name given to her, to them, to their race, and knowing it was not demigod, was not god of any kind at all. Knowing everything now with the shock of instinct, knowing and sick now with the completion of that knowledge. And it wasn't like in the stories and the movies, not at all. There was no beauty in death, no glory. It was all red and torn and bloody and foul.
Debra smiled invitingly at him, red lips drawing away from hard ivory teeth, a pulpy shred of the Bitch's flesh caught in the corner of her mouth, the mouth he always kissed. And he saw, nearly like an afterthought, that the ring had swung free around her neck and that she had his Andy doll clutched tight by one arm, and these human affectations only seemed to make the horror of her utterly real to him. So when she kissed him with her murderous mouth, then tried to draw his face down to the new chalice she offered, he balked and thrashed away from her, from the horror that was her, from the searing, murderous taste of a dead woman on her lips. He got to his feet and raced to the other side of the room and crouched in the moonlight.
And yet still she came at him, eyes curious as a cat's, words seeking him, touch questing. And at last, with his back against the wall, with nowhere else to go, he snapped and made a pained sound of horror in his throat and struck her across the face. Debra went down. It was not a harsh blow, but it had harmed her in a way no blow could because it came from him.
"Aaalek," she whined plaintively, touching her face where a spayed red mark, almost as red as blood, was taking hold.
He glanced sideways at the remains of the Bitch, hating her all the more for doing this to Debra. To them both. He shuddered uncontrollably like someone with a fatal fever, trying to forget all those lessons in Sunday School, all those meandering scriptures with their hidden and damning meanings, but unable to, for the wages of sin were death, right? And death--murder--was the worse sin in the world anyone could ever do. He found one of their yellowing backissues of Weird Tales lying on the floor beside their bed and picked it up. Then he rounded on her, breathing hard but inspired. "Is this what you want, Debra?" he ranted at her, he supposed like a madman. "To be this? Is that what you want? Do you want to be damned?"
"Beloved..." She rose unsteadily and looked at him with her subhuman eyes. Her voice was old, confused suddenly, the voice of some goddess exhumed from her grave of a thousand years. She looked at the mess of their room that she had made as if she could not understand his rage. "She--it's the blood of our enemy!"
"You murdered her, Debra!"
"She doesn't count."
She was closing the black box down on him, sealing the canvas over his face like a burial shroud, because she believed his will was her own and her word the truth, but if she was going to willingly embrace damnation and be a monster like in the movies then she would be doing it alone, without him.
He began to weep, but dryly. "You do what you want, but don't you dare ask me to go into this thing with you! Don't you dare!" He threw the magazine at her with its ghoulish, cruel-eyed cover. "I won't do it! I don't care who you are, I won't! I hate you! I hate you to hell!"
Like a somnambulist her arms went out to him. A child waking from a nightmare or only waking to a new one. She looked at him without understanding. She seemed to fall at his words.
But then he caught her, pulling her out of the nightmare, to him, to the shelter of his body. She sobbed, shuddering, her mouth wet and miserable against his skin; she stained his clothes dark with her tears.
"You said you'd love me forever," she said.
His anger and horror were gone. His Debra was crying and tearing his heart to pieces. He made soothing noises to calm her, stroked her hair, rocking her gently in his embrace as her mind sought the cloister of his own. He sobbed with her, loving her and despising her, repulsed and enchanted by her, feeling so close to her now and yet so very hopelessly far away.
And after many moments it all seemed to end, not the horror of what she--they--had done, but the shock of it. He suddenly found himself capable of thought and words. "We have to go away now," he decided. "Far away before they find out." And she nodded at his words and let him gather her up, cradling her thin, tired little body easily in his arms.
He took her to the bed and dressed her in warm clean clothes and wiped the blood off her face, and then he changed himself and gathered together a few simple but important things. Their pictures. His Andy doll. Once finished, they padded silent and shoeless from the room that had once caged them, been their home. They went down the vacant corridor, down the flight of backstairs that connected the dorms with the butler's pantry at the rear of the Home, and there they put on their boots and coats and prepared to go out into the wintry darkness of the city.
They met no one on the way, and just as well: Alek was certain he would have commanded anyone to stay back as they left the Home by the door through which they had entered it. And he was equally certain anyone he commanded to do so would have obeyed him without question.
"Coelum non animum mutant, qui trans mare current."
The coarse white voice came to him out of the darkness and the dull, weary winter dawn, and Alek's breath caught at the sound as if on a thorn. He untangled himself from his twin and looked around searchingly. Behind them the white wooden horse gently moved on its revolver, clicking forward three paces, then falling back as the wind and snow buffeted it. And Debra, clasped to him where they huddled under the canopy, hoping to wait out the storm, comforted at last to sleep by his words and this place, moaned lightly.
"Horace," said the voice. "Epistles. A favorite of mine."
Holding her tightly, Alek narrowed his eyes and was at last able to pick out the figure standing on the gravel path not a dozen feet from them. The invader had gotten there, but how? He'd thought they were alone here, and he was certain, with his newfound senses, that he would detect even a drunkard's feeble staggering. And yet a strange man stood here now with a hand resting on the ebony war-horse, his robes so black it--and most of the rest of him--disappeared into the night and made his white face and hands swim ghostlike and disembodied in the dark.
No, he was mista
ken, he saw: it was not robes that the man wore but a long black habit and black topcoat, like something a priest might wear.
Alek cradled his sister's head protectively to his heart. "Are you a priest, sir?"
It was all he could think to say. There were priests at the Home who held Mass and regular Sunday School classes every week. He knew what a priest looked like and what a priest was and what a priest did. You told a priest your evils. And priests hated vampires, he knew that too.
The man who looked like a priest smiled with scarcely any change of expression. "In fact, der Kleine, a priest I am. But you mustn't fear. Vampire? You are much more, child. And much less."
Alek didn't know what to say to that or what the priest even meant. "Those words you spoke," he said, "are they Latin?"
One eyebrow arched and the priest's smile grew. "Bright boy."
"What do they mean, sir?"
The priest stepped forward, and as he passed beyond the shadows the last of the midwinter's moon took and became his hair. It was a mane that fell to his waist, and it was as white as a hundred alien suns, as white as a twilight blizzard. He was too impossible to be real, too ephemeral to exist for very long, and yet he did. Some huge power existed within him that he seemed scarcely able to contain, a power so large it dwelled about him almost like a retinue.
"They mean," he said as he swayed forward and Alek saw at last the vanishing pale of this man's eyes, "that you have come home, Alek Knight." The priest touched his face and it was like the cool holy burning of ash.
Alek shivered. "How...do you know who I am?"
The priest laughed. "Ah, but now, little knight, I can't be telling you all. A magician never reveals his secrets, does he?"
Debra stirred in his arms. "Alek," she moaned, "what's happening?"
"It's all right." He kissed her hair. "He's a friend." He looked up at the priest. "He's...he's like us, I think."
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