Impossible, he thought. I dream.
Perhaps. But dream with me now, beloved. Make for us some strange new world and in that world make love to me. I've waited so long.
Alek smoothed away the veil of her hair from her face and kissed her desperately, almost fiercely. And there, she tasted the same, the blood of some immortal saint and the dew on roses at midnight. So good and sweet. His love. I adore you, my beloved, my mate, he told her. And then he made their sacred world and it was down in that infinite other place, a place of light and shadows, color and darkness, that he laid her down and he loved her.
Sean dreamt, and his dreams were all red steel and full of the memory of pain. Pain that bloomed and stretched and turned him inside out, absorbing him, until he was the pain and the pain was him and Sean Stone was only the dream...
He awoke in blindness and in the echo of pain, in confusion. He mewled and pushed himself up against his bed's headboard.
His face ached righteously, man. He touched his face and remembered. Remembered Doc Book's work of putting him back together again, putting together what his feeding could not heal, every screaming, sutured inch of it--and before, what Alek Knight had down to him on the stage of the Empress. The rage, the unfairness of it. Oh, run while you can, man, 'cause you are mine, man. Mine. The memory hurt like pain, like a migraine to all his face...
But there--the pain was going away. Sean found the abrasive end of the sutures and pulled the silvery-red threads from his face one at a time. Then he touched his pretty face, and sure, there were still stitchings of pain and a general tenderness, but, man, he was whole again.
Oh yeah.
Quick--a mirror. He took the sword--Alek's sword lying beside his bed--by the hilt and found his face in its burnished body. Yeah. Double yeah. Gorgeous. He looked like a million bucks again.
His tongue rasped across his fully self-restructured teeth and full pink lips. Whatever else all those slayers bitched and complained about like sorry-for-their-own-asses antiheroes in them books and movies, being a vamp, (even half a vamp) sure as hell had its advantages. Now if only he wasn't so damned hungry. Could feel his own backbone, man. Maybe he'd drive through Mickey D's tonight and pick up that juicy little window girl who always blushed and giggled and bleated like a sheep when he winked at her.
How did that song from Cutting Crew go? "I just died in your arms tonight," Sean sang and giggled, fell back to the mattress, still giggling, rolling with it.
And that's when the body of the whore fell off his bed and onto the floor. Hadn't even noticed it there, man. He looked over the side of the bed, at the redhead's greying face and empty, ceilingward stare. Her throat was gone. Not just chewed and sucked man, but fucking gone. Her head literally hung by strings. The spinal cord, a few ribbons of bloodless flesh and tendon, not much.
Jesus.
Had he done that?
He tried to remember what had happened after the Empress. The march. Trying to catch the rogue. Sucking a few pedestrians in passing to keep the psi going and deadened the pain in his face. The blood. The screaming. But not catching the fuck. Coming back here. Alone.
Alone.
So when had the whore come into play?
Mein Sohn...oh what has become of you?
Sean jerked, remembering now. Remembering...the androidlike woman hovering near like some kind of sacrifice...Amadeus...he shuddered again, more violently...Amadeus feasting, not like some monster in a Hammer film, man, no, not some two-minute Christopher Lee quickie, a lovebite and a few sips. Feasting, man. Like a fucking animal. The blood a sludgy black rouge on his face and chin and throat and chest. The flesh gnashing, the cartilage crunching audibly between the subhuman teeth. Jesus, those teeth...
And then those teeth, that searing hot mouth on his, not biting, but offering the gift of raw red copper-iron strength in a liquid regurgitation of life itself--
Sean swallowed, giggled hysterically and drew back away from the sight of the whore, his fingers on his mouth, feeling the obnoxious crust of dried blood, his and the woman's, all over his lips and teeth and chin. He looked again at the body of the woman and realized he had to make a physical effort not to get down on his knees and bury his face in the awful remains. He bit the ham of his hand to stifle the insane noises his mouth was making, but the action only made him grunt and quickly open his jaws. His teeth felt sharper, more prominent, if that was possible. Was that possible? What the hell was possible anymore? He was some half-human freak living a nightmare inside of a nightmare. And now he had drunk the life out of some cunt who could have been his fucking mother!
Quite abruptly, the whimper gathering in his throat died at the sight of the black bathrobe cast over the foot of his bed. He centered his attention on it because it wasn't his, it was the Father's, and it was something else to look at other than the corpse congealing in a pool of black gore on his bedroom floor. A corpse that had been violated worse than anything that Sean, even with his extensive experience at the Shangri-La, and with Slim Jim, had ever seen.
He crawled like a little boy to the foot of the bed. Curious, he touched the fabric.
Not a bathrobe. A habit.
Put it on, Sean.
With a cry of surprise he leapt from the bed and looked around his room, at the concert posters on the walls, the storybooks and bone collections and CDs scattered wide, at the open-door armoire of falling-out clothes. But no one was hidden here among his things. He was alone.
Put on the habit, beloved, said the voice inside his head more directly.
Oh. Only the Father and his hocus-pocus. Well...all right.
Sean slid out of the sheer, bloodwashed-stiff nightshirt the Father had dressed him in and shrugged into the habit, struggled with some of the little hook and eyelets, gave up on the rest of them, the ones nearest the small of his back where he couldn't quite reach. He stretched and moved around the bed, trying to get a feel for the material and using the bed to block his view of the corpse. Out of sight of the whore, he found he could think a little more clearly. He went to the full-stretch mirror on the backside of his armoire door. There was a little too much drag in the hem and sleeves of the habit, but otherwise it was a pretty righteous fit. Quite nice, actually. Quite... impressive. The black did him up well, gave him almost that same big, pale Reaper look the Father had.
He looked closely and realized that even his eyes looked weird. Too light. Pale, whitish blue.
All right, man, now what?
You must be pure. The trinkets--be rid of them.
And almost immediately, without thought or question, Sean unscrewed his facial studs and earrings, broke the wires of teeth around his neck. The pieces shattered like bone on the cell's floor. He touched his face with wonder. What did he look like barren of his trophies? He knew he felt infinitely more powerful somehow, feather-light and capable of flight. Strange and wonderful. Was this the reason the Father chose to live like a fucking Spartan? Alek too?
He attention returned to the mirror and he was witness to the birth of a new person. He touched the loose yellow silk of his jaw-cut hair, toyed with the idea of letting it go. Long. Rock-musician long. Long enough to plait. Long like Amadeus's was long. He saw himself then: long pale hair and black habit. Pale, somber eyes. A priest? Yeah, a priest, or at least, priestlike. He though yet again of the whore, and suddenly the thought of living like a priest didn't seem like such a ludicrous idea after all. Before the mirror, he genuflected in the invisible presence of his Coven. "Welcome. I am the Covenmaster Stone Man," he stated, tasting the words and grimacing.
That really sucked.
Inspired, he went through the gesture again. "I am the Covenmaster...Amadeus. I am the Chosen. All that you see I comm--"
Yes, my son. The new temple of Amadeus.
Sean choked, caught in mid-bow, stiffening like a little boy caught doing something obscene to himself. He blushed in the face of the Father's shining laughter, lovely and pious and faintly mad, he thought.
The Father was pleased.
Come to me, beloved, commanded the Father. Enter me and become...
The music of the voice drove the dizziness of his hunger away. Drove the nausea of the image of the dead girl on the floor away. It was like in the beginning. This was the lovely coarse voice of the strange man he had found sitting on the sill of his State Institution dorm room one night upon awakening, eyes like white fire in a face as pale as the full moon which had beat down upon them both. That night the Father had come to him and had known him by name and had spoken those words low and so intimately to him: Come with me and come into the arms of the Coven, mein Sohn, into those arms which love you best of all. And who could love such a thing as you but one of your own?
Yes who? His mother? His mother was dead. And better off that way. Better dead than a slave to a neverending procession of strange men night after night. Better dead, he thought with a sideways glance at the girl, than a victim of a monster.
And so, without hesitation, Sean let himself out of his cell and started down toward the Great Abbey. He did not feel the cold of the twisting corridors carrying him along, nor the stone steps under his feet, meeting them so graciously as he descended into the beauty and immortal secrets of the old house. The Abbey would receive him and there he would see his beautiful, white-faced Father waiting on him, speaking low the words he so cherished. My love...my own.
But when he arrived he found the Father did not sit in his usual perch at the head of the Coventable; instead, he was kneeling on the dais in the shadow of his altar, the wedge of his pressed hands resting at his mouth, his sight miles off.
The chandelier had been lit, its whitish power bruising the stone walls of the Abbey and blushing the strong old faces on the tapestries. A halo of it circled the Father like an angelic laser of light. Some alien spotlight capable of practically deitizing a man. Sean took in the sight, the chandelier lit for some ceremony, the Abbey itself vacated but for the two of them and a handful of surviving bats irritated to restless flight by the alien impinge of light. Slowly, almost fearfully, he walked to the nave, then up the steps to the dais, so that the two of them, himself and the Father, existed in the Altar's shadow equally.
Sean looked aside at the Father.
Amadeus spoke.
"Alek knows the location of the Chronicle," said the Father.
Sean shuddered but did not show it. The Chronicle. It was half their problem. Their other half, of course, was Alek himself. But the idea, suddenly, of the two problems coming together, converging--Alek actually getting the damned Chronicle--hung like a dooming storm over Sean's thoughts. That lying piece of shit book was probably enough to totally unbalance the precarious relationship they already had with Rome. Or so said the Father. "Shit. Where?"
Amadeus told him.
"There. Christ, that's dumb."
"It is fitting. It is the place of beginnings, and it is just that it be the place of his defeat."
"Is he there now?"
"Nein. His is with her in a place that is closed to me. I know only that he makes love to her, that he drinks of her power and her passion."
"That Roman whore--?."
"Not her. The other. The first."
"Who?"
"Debra."
"Who is Debra?"
"Death."
Sean's flesh hardened as if touched in every place by a steel sword. He scratched at his collar, his sleeves. "What...what do we do?"
"Prepare. When he is finished he...they will come for me."
"Shit."
The Father was silent momentarily. And then he said, with purpose, "I have been doomed by a prophecy I have no power over. Death has marked me. But I refuse to die at the hands of an infidel."
Sean shivered. "What...can I do for you, Father?"
"Vel caeco appareat."
Sean said, "`It would be apparent even to a blind man.'" And laughed, amazed with himself, that he should understand the words.
Amadeus nodded. "Then too, my beloved, you know what must be done."
"Ah...well, no."
"Take me."
Horrified, Sean looked at him.
But the Father only said, breaking his pose and reaching for him, framing his face in his long hands and kissing him with sad passion, "It is time, no? You have been awaiting this. Your desire. The Rite of Covenmaster is yours. Drink of me and be complete. Drink until I move within you, my beautiful slayer."
Sean hesitated, groaned, shivered. He wanted to protest, but then came his master's lips on his throat, caressing his thirst, his need, his hunger to be...more. More than some little whoregirl's punching bag, more than Slim Jim's young prey or Alek Knight's rebellious little acolyte, more than the Stone Man. More than a punk stereotype with cotton between his ears. More--
But he would be what?
And all at once, Sean was afraid. Amadeus had lied. He was not a vampire, at least not the kind he had come to understand as real, the kind he was and Alek was and all or most of them were. He was not a victim of Lilithine blood. A subspecies of the human race. He was less, and more. A servant to strange forces, stranger understandings. A demon, a wraith. A beast and a priest and both borne of a savagery he had never known in all his life. Hungry. Starved. Incomplete. And some part of Sean's expanding intellect tried to reason this out, what Amadeus was with what he did, and failed.
After this Communion, this passionate exchange of blood, what was he--Sean--to be?
What in hell was he to be?
The cold kiss. The stab of bone-sharp teeth. The hiss of an uncoiling nest of snakes all about them. And in the spinning private cloister of Sean's mind he heard the answer: You will be everything you have always wanted to be...and everything you have ever feared. You will be Amadeus.
"But..." He gasped. That mouth. It was on him, in him, a living thing, separate from the Father, with its own hungers and desires. Sean shuddered yet again, leaned against the Father as the Father fed off of him, giving up the strength and red life so easily that the Father had lent him earlier. Yes, he understood how that had happened now. What drove it. What had driven them both to destroy the girl. The hunger...nothing was like it in the whole world, nothing at all. Love was like that hunger. And now it was as if he were being loved by some underworld god. Hades. Satan. Set. It was as if he were being eaten alive by a cannibal lover. The girl...she had know this and willingly endured it. The hell that was heaven...
Through the veil of passion, Sean fought for his thoughts, his fears. "But...I only...only wanted to be something...more."
The mouth let him go. The beautiful and bloodslathered and unkind teeth let him go. "You will be everything."
"Everything..." Sean murmured as Amadeus held him close and stroked his throat, kissed his mouth and the chains of his tears, laid upon his face his bloody lip prints until the touch and taste and smell was so great, his hunger so far greater, he thought he might weep or die or simply implode from the force of it. Sean leaned into his master, felt no desires but that for giving in. The choices had all been made and be understood that the time for protest was over. It had ended the day he took the Father's hand and escaped the dorm with him. It had ended the day Slim Jim died and left a child with blood and mucus all over his face sitting on the floor, afraid to move, to even breathe.
And strange that in this moment of which he'd dreamt so long and so hard that his thoughts be filled not with images of Amadeus, nor even his mother, but of Alek Knight.
Alek. He had run. He'd escaped this.
Why?
"I will make of you a god on the earth," the Father whispered against his mouth, "a god whom none will again harm. No more hurt. eternal and unstoppable and accountable to no god for your sins."
"No hurt," Sean repeated, and he was not surprised that he wept keenly into the frost of his masters' hair, the sight of a dead man's shredded bloodless throat glowing at the center of his mind like an ember. And the woman--the woman torn like a doll. "Oh Jesus, Father, I love you
. Save me, please. Please save me." The words did not seem foolish and they did not embarrass him, and as he worshipped his master's face and hair with his kisses he felt his terror lessen. His soul and savior and power, he thought. How he wanted to die for Amadeus, crack his soul open upon the rock of the Father's divinity.
And when pressure at the back of his skull brought his kisses to the Father's throat he scarcely knew it or cared.
"Drink me," Amadeus invited. "Drink me and become."
Sean kissed him deeply with his every passion, kissed and licked at his master's throat and the thin glass of flesh which was all that separated him from his eternity. His teeth ached and his mind screamed. And when his time came and he could hold off no longer, Amadeus held him fiercely and crooned to him in languages he could not fathom.
Booker dreamt, and in his dreams he walked upon a red desert full of white skulls. They were ancient things beneath his feet, those skulls, thin as eggshells. And where he walked they shattered, and where they shattered came the angry red geysers of their ghosts. The sky above him was cramped and low, a mocking backwards-running river of blood. Horrible, all of it, like something Alek might paint on a good day. Fucking Dali. Where the hell was the exit?
Booker walked on, searching, but he did not hurry, because to hurry would mean to burst more of the skulls under his feet. He walked on and he kept his eyes steady on the flat, hellish horizon far ahead, for he knew if he looked down he would see the millions of empty, screaming eye sockets beseeching him, and that would be too much; that would drive him mad.
He walked in that hell for a thousand years. He walked until, at last, he came upon them. And stopped.
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