Slayer

by Karen Koehler

  "And they paid me. Well, most of the time they paid me.

  "Sometimes they refused to pay, shaking the money under my nose before stuffing it back in their pockets, daring me to do something about it. Sometimes they grew ugly and slapped me around or tried to strangle me. I never knew who was going to turn psycho on me, but one thing was for certain--they all paid for their offense. One old grandfathery gentleman put a straight razor to my throat and told me he was the reincarnation of Jack the Ripper and he was going to disembowel me. He wasn't quick enough. Paris had given me a knife of iron as a wedding present and taught me how to use it."

  She hesitated. "They always seemed to grow ugly when they were done. Up until then they were usually polite. I saw the pattern emerge. It was always the polite ones who turned on you, as if they were punishing you for their own weakness, making you feel worthless only to feel their own worth again, trying to make you powerless to convince themselves that they weren't powerless against their own sexuality.

  "I worked freelance for decades before meeting Rapper and his girls. He's a kind man for a pimp, understanding but firm, and he knows how to keep his girls in order with just the right combination of intimacy and intimidation. In all the time I have spent in his stable, I have never known a girl to cheat him. But whether it is fear or love or some alchemical combination of the two responsible for such loyalty, I cannot say. I have come to think of Rapper as the Bishop I didn't dare disobey at the Vatican. He fucks me the same as the Bishop did, but only occasionally, and without the hostility and brutality the churchmen always brought to my bed. He makes me feel protected, something I haven't felt since Paris..."

  She stopped speaking. She was watching him with tears in her eyes.

  Alek let his pen drop and tried to pretend he didn't hear the violence downstairs rattling the bones of the old building. "You use him--them--for your Bloodletting," he whispered. "You're letting them take it, aren't you?"

  Her eyes blinked closed and a woman wailed plaintively, the sound rebounding against the walls of the brownstone like a gunshot. "The city takes my years and I take its jaded life; I think it a fair trade until the day when I finish Paris's work."

  "I'm sorry," he whispered only. Nothing else seemed appropriate. He studied his work, felt the throbbing pressure of tears. For whom? For himself? For Teresa and her plight? For his own Phyrric victory? He didn't know; he only knew the map was too good for this foolish whelp to have created. He knew only that wherever she was, Akisha looked down on the work with approval.

  He lay back against the wall and rested his eyes as she came forward to take the map from him. She studied it for many moments, but he did not look at her witch-white face, looked instead at the idiot walls around him and shivered violently. The air here was ancient and oppressive. Moist airlessness falling in around him from all sides like the carefully set stones of a royal sepulcher. Another cry echoed up from below, a whimper like a beaten child makes, and he was choking, dying inside, dry-drowning. He made a wretched, animalistic noise in his throat.

  She touched his face and the contact stopped his shudders. "Leave now," she commanded. "The man in you needs to see the sun."

  He hesitated, a ridiculous paranoia eating away at his heart. What if he left and something tragic happened? He had absolutely no luck in protecting his women, he knew that.

  She sensed it. "I'm safe; go above."

  He rose obediently. It was truly amazing, the new strength he felt in his legs. He saw the way out in her mind and felt her will usher him through the mildewy labyrinth of rooms and down the stairs to the shelled-out lobby of some abandoned Eastside project.

  The world had changed while he'd slept. Where once it had only seemed weary and obsolete, now it was full of monsters. The vendors looked like terrifying mannequins with their arms continuously reaching; padding dogs on leashes smiled at him with their enormous werewolf teeth, old Czech men grunted and swept the snow from their stoops, reminding him of wax duplicates of Bela Lugosi he'd seen in museums.

  Monsters. Monsters everywhere.

  Like the one he had made an alliance with.

  Like the one that had slain Akisha.

  He swallowed. Akisha was dead. Still dead. Dead for a whelp that had not visited her except as Death in over twenty years. And all because Amadeus had made their conflict an open forum. All because of me, he thought.

  He trooped up the avenue, breathing in the salt of his tears and the sweet decay of the city. He had some vague notion in his mind of spending his meager remaining bankroll on some decent piece of steel at the Gun & Pawn shop up avenue, but when the heels of his hands struck the door of a tavern on the avenue called Tookey's he realized that this was his true destination all along.

  He'd never been in a tavern this far south, but he found Tookey's to be homey, carpeted, leathered, almost a cafe but for the group of uptown escorts clustered around a small round table near the door, drinking cheap espresso and gossiping on their off-time.

  The ladies looked up at his approach, two blondes and a dark brunette, all bleached and battleworn, cigarettes clenched in beartrap grimaces, cold dresses, heatless skin. Veterans, yet not a one could be said to be more than twenty-two. He moved on past.

  The barkeep was elfish and middle-aged, with hairy, long-fingered hands that drummed and jittered to the rhythm of the Alice Cooper song on the jukebox. "How you doin', buddy?"

  Terrible.

  "Fine," Alek answered immediately. "Long Island Ice Tea?"

  The elf nodded and went to work, whistling along with Cooper's obsession with those poisonous kisses he was so in love with.

  Alek turned his back on the man and his mad, merry whistling. Through the streaky cafe window he watched the sun rest between the Twin Towers on its downward path. He counted the cash in his wallet, hating himself for doing this now, hating Akisha more for dying and pushing him off the wagon.

  The sun went red on his face with its leaving.

  Hating Amadeus the most, he decided, his web, his nightmare. Burning with hatred for the subhuman creature with his empty eyes and hollow heart--

  The ladies at the table rose and helped each other into their coats.

  Poisoned with hatred for the un-thing that had taken every last thing of any real value from him--

  The ladies paid for their drinks and headed for the door, and he suddenly stopped hating and he suddenly stopped breathing at the sight of the tall brunette looking his way and flipping her ragged long hair over the collar of her red leather jacket. She smiled at him and toyed with the gold ring on the chain around her neck, turning it so it flashed the burning red light of the fading sun in his eyes.

  Alek shut them a moment. Moments later, he blinked them open and saw she was leaving. Forgetting the drink, forgetting everything, he rolled the money in his fist and approached her, grabbed her by the arm and turned her around.

  "Debra?"

  The brunette sucked down her nub of a cigarette and eyed him warily as her sisters looked on. "Hi," she said, and up close she smelled vaguely musky like old perfume and gin. He looked down and saw that a small gold cross graced the hollow of her throat, not a ring.

  "I can be Debra," she told him.

  "You a cop?" said one of the prostitute's blonde sisters.

  He continued to stare at her throat. "No. Do I look like one?"

  "He's a cop, Chrissy," said the other sister.

  "I'm not a cop," Alek insisted.

  "Leave me alone!" said the girl, suddenly, backing away like a frightened animal, her green eyes large and shy.

  Alek tightened his hand on her arm to arrest her escape.

  "He's a fucking narc," said the first sister.

  "Chrissy!" said the second sister. "Come on!"

  Chrissy began to weep and pulled herself free of his hold. And as her disguise of cosmetic paint poured down her face to reveal the innocent beauty of her thirteen-year-old features, Alek felt his heart shrivel and die. He let her go. He pushed his wa
y past the girls and out onto the walk that would take him like a magic carpet back to the skeletal tenement. Back to Teresa.

  She had lit candles throughout the attic.

  "You mustn't be so self-conscious of your brilliance."

  He crept like a villain into her room.

  In the dimness of the musty, claustrophobic space her delicate face and hands shone like virgin lace where she stood staring up at something on the wall. "You are an artist of terrible strength." She refused to abandon the shadows for the moment. "You make her truly immortal," she said.

  Alek stopped, dizzy with disorientation. And then, emboldened by that same feeling of weightless displacement, he walked across the creaking floorboards to a portrait dominating the center wall over a long-dead fireplace. He wondered why he had not noticed it until now and could conclude only that it must have been covered by a sheet. That or it was Teresa's glamour at work on him again, letting him see, but only with the blinders she created.

  The portrait was of a woman of supernatural beauty, raven-haired, with predatory brown eyes so beautiful a critic might have thought the artists had exaggerated their brilliance. Her features were delicate, her skin alabaster, and yet there was an unmistakable look of power in her face. Perhaps it was her mouth, the wide lips painted red, smirking but not smirking. It would have given her an expression of bitter derision had she not been so beautiful.

  It was, of course, his own face at certain times. It was Debra. And he wondered how in hell Teresa had gotten ahold of the portrait. He'd sold it years ago on the sidewalk outside his loft. Sold it for a loaf of whitebread and a bottle of vodka. He remembered.

  Teresa turned away from the portrait to look at him. Her eyes held the flames of the many candles like cages of red birds. And he thought rather absently, angel of fire.

  "Angel of vengeance," she answered him.

  "Whose?"

  "Yours."

  "I mean whose angel."

  "I know." Red ghosts played over her face, gave her the semblance of life, like marble dutifully painted to seem like real flesh to the artist. Like he had meant Debra's portrait to do. She'd fed fairly recently, and now for reasons he feared to guess at, he felt no real revulsion. No fear.

  "How did you get that picture?" he asked.

  She looked at it. She halved her eyes like a cat. "I knew the owner. She gave it to me. I couldn't believe you would sell it."

  "You were watching me? Even then?"

  She didn't answer him, and he felt suddenly confused by her words, as if he were a child being made to play a game the rules of which had never been explained to him. So instead of understanding them, or wanting to, he moved closer to her and said, to change the subject, "Can you read the map?"

  She glanced askance at the bed where it lay, narrowed her eyes further. She said, "Things change, they changeth not." She went to the map and touched a small odd legend high up in a corner. "We begin here tonight. I know this place--"

  "Don't."

  She was silent; and then she said, "`Your eyes will be mine.'"

  "I'm his fucking spy," he said miserably. "Whether I want to be or not."

  "There's something unnatural about him. Something wrong."

  "Debra said that."

  And Debra had been more than right. Alek looked away into the heat of the flames of the candles on the mantel and felt them turn his face to wax. How had he not seen what she'd seen? Was he so blind? He could glimpse the life of anyone in this city, could even touch it briefly if he so chose to, and yet he had not been able to see the darkness sunk into the eyes of the one who had known him best. How was it possible to see so far and yet remain so sightless?

  Teresa stepped forward out of the dark. The medieval gown was gone; it had been replaced by the lethal clothing of the day, a black little sliplike dress and fishnet stockings and a pair of battered Doc Martens. He looked at her cold little streetwalker's garb, the way the material, as worn as it was, slithered like silk over her hips and breasts. Candlelight played like gold across the shining twin rings in her lower lip. He reached and found her black leather jacket on the bed beside the map and held it in front of him like a shield as she approached him.

  "You must be cold," he said, offering her the coat.

  She shook her head, her hair falling loose and tangled like black lace across her naked white throat. She smiled ever so slightly with her smoky eyes and mouth.

  He got a solid grip on the jacket.

  Teresa only closed the space between them, saying nothing, everything. Primitive images invaded his thoughts. Making love to her, right then and there, and then going down into the city of humans cowering in the dark to run and hunt among them like a wolf in a field of naive sheep. But it was only her glamour. Her thoughts. It was.

  She grew close enough for him to smell the kill on her breath. Her lips parted daintily; her teeth gleamed white. And then she turned and gave him her back, spread her delicate arms. "Please."

  Feeling ridiculous and defeated, he slid the jacket upon her like a queen's royal mantle. She took his hands, folded them around her middle, edged her head back until her rustling-thick hair brushed his bottom lip. He let his hands linger at her waist for only the shortest of moments, just until she let him go, and then he stepped back, away. She turned back around with her gifts of death and love and seduction and took his hand. She turned it over as if she would read his fate once more and kissed it, put it to her heart. "Don't leave me, Alek Knight. Never leave me."

  He watched the flames caress her face and throat. There was red now everywhere in her divine image. Red in her mouth and eyes. Red reflected on her silky black jacket. Red in her touch.

  She was luring him out into the center of her web, weaving the spell of her existence over him the way she had for countless others over countless centuries. He saw the years in her thoughts, the cities, Venice and Rome and Naples, the names and the faces of her kills, too many to count, heard the innocent words of her seduction. She was a woman after all, and an animal, and woman and animal, she lured the unwary to her with the sweet perfume of the pitcher plant on her skin and the venom in her deadly kiss. And there, in countless backstreets and convent cells with the moon a knife in her eyes, she had taken their dark Roman faces to her white breast, given her slender frame over to their ungentle hands, let them kiss the purity from off her cheeks. And she had willingly drunk their smoky, beery, decayed breaths on those nights, because it was what pleased them and what they most wanted from their victim and what their exotic pleasures most demanded; but always it ended the same way, not with the ecstasy of life but the exquisite agony of death and early damnation. It was her power and her gift and she gave it willingly and asked for nothing but their life in return. The creed of the predator. Survival at all cost. But though she offered herself as the venomous fruit of Eden itself there was none that saw her soul, none who glimpsed her age and sorrows and her many painful wisdoms...

  No, wait. No one but Paris, once--

  "And you. You see me as I truly am," she said and leaned close so she was touching, caressing all his body with her own, the feeling so acute it was like the skipping of a pulsepoint in the dark. She rubbed herself against him, and the raw sensuality of it grew, warming, seething, seeming to gain a living presence all about them. And then her mouth was there like wet velvet, like an orchid, and she was kissing him with all her vengeance, and her lips seemed so frail on his, but gathering suddenly in strength, and after a moment's hesitation he kissed her back, almost desperate, the sweetness of the deadly pitcher plant and the bitterness of her venom seizing up the priest inside him. For a moment she changed, and he wasn't at all surprised that she should taste of roses and fire and the things that were red, but it was only her charms at work on him, and when he tensed at the taste and tried to draw away she changed again, and again he tasted her venom and her years and the wicked edge of hungry, unspent desire.

  She kissed his mouth, her hands branding his back with fire, slidin
g like steel beneath his coat. He whispered to her and closed his eyes and held and worshipped her. He wanted her now with an urgency that frightened and appalled him. She had cracked the barrier of his hypocrisy. She had let in all the floodwaters of his pain and all his sweat-soaked midnight dreams. He kissed her mouth, biting her gently, urging her on, offering himself as a villain and a victim, whichever she most desired, everything if she desired it, his soul if she demanded it.

  Her teeth touched the hypersensitive skin under his chin and stopped. "No."

  "Please."

  "No."

  "I want you to."

  "I can't belong to you when you belong to her."

  And with those words she broke her fragile spell and set him free. He set her on her feet and turned away, returning to the portal-window and the dusky-greyness of the city under nightfall and put a hand to the sucking cold of the plane of glass and wept, empty and unfinished and aching for something with no name and no presence.

  17

  In his dream he dreamt he was asleep dreaming he was awake. And the white face came to him then, floating, lingering above his bed, close, its breath as sharp and raw as sleet against his cheek. The quilt was drawn away and he felt a long white hand caress him, then cover his heart as if it would take it from him like a red jewel and hold it in the palm of its hand.

  Sean Stone...Stone Man.

  A burning cold mouth more knowledgeable than that of the most ancient prostitute kissed first his cheek and then his mouth. He shuddered with the contact, could not breathe for a moment. He was being loved with such great power and control he felt himself weaken under his lover's spell. Weakness. In his dreams he was a god, always a god, more than man or vampire. And it was that thing more than anything else--the weakness and loss of will--that told him that this was no dream--

  He opened his eyes.

  The face above him was that of Lucifer's before the fall, lovely, alluring, with cheekbones like planes of ice and hair as brittle and beautiful as springtime frost. Eyes...not colorless as he'd somehow expected, but black, as black as uncracked mirrors of obsidian, deep and dark and crazed with life. Lidless and serpentlike.