Homey obediently went for his shirt on the bed--then grabbed Alek by the arm instead and swung him around, tried to land a four-ringed knucklepunch to his face. Alek caught it in his fist. Held it. He looked Homey in the face and felt the man's pulse tick with useless, angry energy. The man sneered.
Alek sneered back. "I said. Get. Out."
"I paid good money for the cunt," Homey said. "You her fuckin', cocksuckin' husband or what?"
Alek let the man's fist go. Grabbed him by the back of the skull instead and thrust his own weight against the prickass, sent him crashing back into the wall beside the bed. He felt the drywall groan, give. Homey's skull banged against a stud. The vase of fake orchids on the nightstand beside the bed rattled, danced, fell over.
Homey blanched, choked.
Kill him, he'd like to fucking kill the motherfucker's ass.
Alek let go of his head and stepped back.
Homey looked down and stared at the forty-six-inch ceremonial tachi sword slung up tight under his balls with wonder for where it had come from and how fast it could have found its way there.
From one brotha to another, thought Alek, and smiled with genuine malice. "We want to be alone," he said, raising the sword ever so slightly. "Get it?"
Homey put his hands up in an authentic I-give-up-man gesture and reached for his shirt for real this time. Without putting it on--or for that matter, without even reaching for his wallet lying on the nightstand beside the overturned vase, an act that would have made him cross the path of the tachi--Homey backed away to the door and opened it behind him, slunk out backwards, gold chains a-jangling, grey-faced, defeated.
"Put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door, won't you?" Alek asked.
Homey took the sign with him and slammed the door.
Alek put the sword down.
Teresa crossed her legs. Though her face had hardened from the moment of his arrival, she seemed to be having trouble maintaining it now. "He and his friends have a lot of money and he could have recommended me," she said.
He said nothing; he watched her face, all of it cold, unbroken ice, all reflection, as if she were doing her damnedest to hide what lurked inside. She looked away. "My time is money. And I would appreciate it if you would leave now."
"You gave up on me," he said to her at last.
She looked up then. "You gave up on you."
He opened his mouth to say...what? Suddenly his whole being rebelled against this and he had to take a step back, away from the slayer in himself--that Amadeus-made creature with armor as black and hard as beetleshell. Silence roared up between them like an icon to his pride. But pride, like regret, was a useless emotion. He broke it. "I'm sorry I disappointed you, beloved. I'm sorry I made you hate me. I really am."
She tilted her head. She flushed. "Don't be so stupid."
"Am I? Stupid?"
"You are if you think I could hate you." She dropped her eyes, her lashes like crimson fans on the marble-white planes of her cheeks. "I was angry, caro. You angered me. No one has angered me in a long time."
He approached her. He touched her hair freely in response, wound it like silk around his fingers. Then he kissed her with all the fierce hunger of his passion, kissed her, unafraid at last of that passion, and he heard his twin's contented sigh echoing up through the tunnel of his soul. He broke the kiss, kissed her again, and again, said to her, breathlessly, against her mouth, "I'll never disappoint you again, I promise. I swear it..."
"Your eyes." She touched his face and shook her head. "You're different, What have you seen?"
He smiled mischievously, brimming.
Her dark eyes brightened. "You know."
"I was shown."
"Where then?"
"So close, so, so close. Yet a lifetime away." He took her hand, He studied her face. Loved her eyes. The planes of her cheeks. Her eyelashes. Her rare smile. Loved the strength and determination in her heart, the many wisdoms in her mind. Loved her...not as a lover, he realized, but as a student loves his sensei, all but worships her. "Come, fly with me. Let me show you."
"I will...but..." She shook her head with wonder.
"What is it, Teresa? What?"
She looked deep into his eyes. "What are you?" she whispered.
He stood up. "Complete."
27
How immortal was the altar. In almost thirty-eight years it had remained unchanged. It perhaps bore a new and modern skin of graffiti and its red and gold paint was weak and its brass rings a long time lost, but at its soul the altar remained changeless. The fellowship of animals remained in their painful stances, heads tossed back as if in the death rictus of poison. So many years and its milky canopy mirrors reflected still the swarm of city lights and the rise and fall of the deathless sun.
Things change, they changeth not.
On the icy gravel path, Alek stopped. They were alone. Lone worshipers at the altar. Few New Yorkers ventured this far into the park at this hour of the abyss. Rather, even the insomniacs and dogwalkers and crazies would be staying to the gravel paths near Central Park South and along Lexington Avenue, waiting for the sun to burn off the mist and some of the cold and chase away all the monster they knew dwelled in the dark here.
He shivered quite suddenly and wondered if it was only the cold, looking on the barren benches, the night's worth of garbage clustering on heat grates, the rats squirming through the wired baskets on their early-morning foraging trips.
"Here?" Teresa said, creeping up beside him.
"Under the carousel. It's all he had time for before..." Another shiver. Cold. Danger. Or an echo of danger. Perhaps.
Another slayer. Not perhaps...
"He's here," Alek said.
"The Stone Man."
"Not Stone Man."
She withdrew Paris's ornate knife. It gleamed dirtily in the coppery sodium lights surrounding the carousel.
"Won't you go back?" he pleaded. "For God's sake, the sun--"
"I want the fucking Chronicle."
"You'll be blind in half an hour."
"Then let's do this already and quit arguing about it." She looked at him challengingly. She had opted for heavier, darker clothing this time. A wool coat and hat that made her look like some princess out of a Russian novel, black shades that wrapped around her eyes nearly completely. Not that the meager black fabric and plastic would help. In about an hour the sun would crest and turn her world into a watery red inferno she would no more be able to sustain than a man could bathe fully within the sun's unrelenting rays and not collapse, blind, from heatstroke. But trying to convince her to wait until nightfall was impossible. Trying to make her wait for him to return from this even more difficult. He knew. He'd been trying to convince her otherwise since they'd left the Marriott more than half an hour ago.
"Killing yourself won't be avenging Paris, you know," he said.
A crow called harshly and she looked up. The firs and the naked, narrow-boned maples writhed alive with a rich dark foliage of daybirds. He felt a shiver that was not fear. She turned away, met his gaze with such open hostility he found it incredulous that this was the same woman whose words had moved him so only an hour ago.
He spoke again, but now as if from great height or distance. "It was writ the animals would weep and music would come forth and black blood and a midnight sun, and the Covenmaster would not know another rising of the day."
Teresa looked cynically upon the carousel animals inside their cage of time and disuse. The revolver moved, out only laboriously, and not two whole inches. The stage protested even that. "The carousel has not turned in ten years, caro."
He breathed in the cold and the steel and listened to the gravel crackling like bone dust under his feet. I don't want to be here, Tahlia. I don't want to be doing this, Byron, my mapmaking friend. I want to be elsewhere, away. I want to be safe, I want to be hidden somewhere in the shadows of the city and not here, not now. I don't want to know if I can beat him. I don't care to know. I just want to b
e finished, finished...
Debra sighed and laughed disheartenedly. Afraid, Slayer? Are you a coward as well as a murderer, then?
The carousel clicked forward three paces and displaced shadow. And momentarily, before sliding back under a cloak of darkness, he saw it--a dark paralyzed mount with a figure sitting sidesaddle upon it. Still. Waiting for him.
Like in the beginning.
They had come full circle.
So.
Above a blackbird cackled and rattled the air with its voice. Teresa drew cautiously back, back off the path like some pre-recorded ballet, recoiling but not retreating. She looked at him, her eyes luminous and full of night and understanding. I would stand with you, but I know my place in prophecy. I know my place as Noah and Moses and Jesus knew theirs. To wait. You must go alone. Otherwise he will make me a pawn to make you do what he wants.
"He will try to kill you," she said.
Again Debra laughed, but like a wraith, sneeringly.
Afraid, Slayer?
"He had that power," Alek answered. He went to her and took her knifehand, held up the lethal little weapon, touched his tongue to the edge. He felt no pain. He did taste his own coppery sweetness. The final host. It would bleed slow for hours and keep his battlehunger up. He touched her hair but did not kiss her, not now, not when he wanted to touch the anger and the emptiness in his childhood heart. Finished, he walked, alone, toward the altar.
The dark horse ticked forward as if summoned to meet him. And now it did not slide. And the master of the horse appeared fully, unshielded. Just like that first time in the cold and the dark, but that his face was turned down and away and a wide round Quaker's hat concealed his beautifully awful features.
Alek mounted the stage and stopped. He narrowed his eyes on the silent figure and waited.
After a moment the hat was tipped up and back on the blonde head. Tiny filed teeth grinned up at him, gleaming like pearls in the dark. "Hey there, man." The slayer's coat slit open to show an old Radiohead concert T-shirt. Alek flinched back, lurched against the dolphin at the sight of the spineless little prick that went around calling himself the Chosen.
"Drunk again, sailor," snickered Sean. In his slayer's coat and his own modern wrapper shades he looked nearly comical, like some kid broken away from his Halloween frat party and come to haunt the Park and the carousel just to be a pain in the neck. He lounged back on the carousel horse as casual as a cat. "You know, man, you look righteously disappointed. You were expecting, maybe, like, Count-fucking-Dracula?"
"Amadeus," Alek said uncertainly. "I was expecting Amadeus."
Sean pouted. "Real shitter, man. As it turns out, the Father's busy making excuses to the Vatican on his goddamn knees, man. And all because of fucking you. So looks like you gonna have to make do with me."
Alek recovered, leaned around a pole. "Fine. This should take about five minutes."
Sean pigged his eyes and offered Alek the bird. "Fuck you, man."
Ring finger? Alek sidestepped. Not right. The little shit would not get that wrong. Would not--
He eyed the Stone Man closely, flesh thin and translucent and almost blue in the moonlight, earlobes naked of their decorative arsenal of steel and bone. Where were his trophy teeth on their wires? His leather jacket and his chains?
"You've changed, haven't you?" he said.
Sean smiled crookedly as he eased himself down off the horse. He made a flouncy gesture with his hands, like he was maybe pushing back a theatre curtain only he could see. "Maybe I'm assuming my role as Covenmaster."
Suddenly, the dream--
Sean with his master's eyes, his master's smile.
I am Amadeo...Asmodeus. I am the Chosen. I am the Coven...
"No," said Alek, looking around nervously. "You're lying. Why are you lying?"
...the sword with a blood-blackened hilt. All that you see I command...
"Who the hell are you?"
Sean snickered. "The Stone Man."
Alek shook his head. But what had he expected, a transfiguration? The face was unchanging, offering Alek nothing. But the mind...a book suddenly, pregnant with history, with time, its words twisted into the languages of other places and other people and scribed in blood. It toppled, that book, tumbled over, its pages opening like wings in flight, its words clear and sharp and utterly false. Ugly. Such pain. A twist of the soul. And inside the private chamber of Alek's mind, at the very height of understanding, a seeping voice like a whispered battlecry:
Memento mori, beloved.
Amadeus's hand, which was Sean's but not Sean's, flickered out. Alek saw a brief glimmer like the sun before it strikes the horizon. Then a bloom of scarlet burst heavenward and splashed the dark horse's paralyzed flank. It painted the Sean-thing, his hair, his empty lifeless face. Ideograms of blood splattered across Sean's shades like a talented if disturbed child's artwork.
Alek tottered back in defense, but too late. There was a narrow, unfelt pain in his throat. He put his hands there and felt a fast, cold spring. He looked down at himself, at the red life that was his but also Teresa's and Debra's racing out of him and embracing the ground, turning the snow pink as candy floss at his feet.
On the stage the Sean-thing was standing, sliding the dripping wristblade back into its secret sheath. The thing cocked its head sideways, a curious animal, an artist fascinated by his work.
Alek knew then. He understood everything, or suspected it. Sean would be laughing at him; only Amadeus drew blood piously. "Father," he whispered in words and blood because it was true, because it was him, it was Amadeus...
The wrappers were ripped away like some final disguise and Alek saw beneath, saw the lizardlike eyes, and looked away. Before him the park rocked a little to and fro as if the entire world were perched on a great swinging, cosmic pendulum. He shivered, felt so cold on the inside, white cold, cold as silence. He gripped the wound at his throat, but it was an action entirely reflexive. He could no longer feel his outer shell, only his insides, his veins and arteries as they began to collapse in line and shut off odd portions of his body. Taste was gone. No hands. He felt a terrifying lightness gathering under his heavy coat.
"Look at me, mein Sohn."
He did.
"You are dying," said Amadeus in Sean's voice and cadence and yet his own harsh accent. "The blood is the life after all and the life runs out of you now. Will you try and catch it?"
He tried, but it ran obstinately through his fingers.
Powerful, hulklike arms took him from behind. Not Amadeus. Too great, even for the Father. Robot. The enormous ball-breaker of a slayer gripped him firmly around the waist and kept him upright on his knees, not unkindly but with enough strength to indicate he had no intention of fucking around if Alek started to struggle. Alek did not struggle. There was no strength left to struggle.
Breathe, blink, look up--no.
A shadow...
No.
Teresa stood on the edge of the bicycle path, eyes riveted on his struggle, oblivious to the shadow slinking up behind her. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out of him but blood and a mewling kittenlike noise. His eyes instead went to the shadow, widened. Teresa turned then, but it was over already.
Aristotle turned the million-candle-power halogen on her face. Teresa screamed and hid her face.
Aristotle giggled like a schoolboy playing a nasty prank. Teresa turned around and went down on her face, Aristotle's knee in her back.
Amadeus nodded.
And then everything happened at once.
Alek balked the moment Aristotle, the prick, started to pick Teresa up. But Robot was having none of it and tightened his hold on Alek's waist until Alek was certain his newly-mended ribs were going to be crushed to powder in the slayer's massive hands. Aristotle picked Teresa up in a fireman's carry; Teresa hissed and whipped around like a cat, her hands reaching for Aristotle's eyes, missed, tore a flap in his cheek with her fingernails; Aristotle cursed, swung around, cracking the back o
f her head against a tree trunk. Teresa slumped over his shoulder, as still as the dead. Cursing still, Aristotle couried her semiconscious body over to his master, a dog eager to please.
"The little whore," Amadeus muttered and gripped Teresa's face in one massive hand, his nails cutting black furrows in her white face. "Open your eyes, little whore."
The pain revived her. Her eyes fluttered. She worked them open. Her body shuddered, but the pain was too much for her. She sighed, almost a word, her blinded eyes bleeding slits.
"Paris was a fool," Amadeus whispered and backhanded her across the face, knocking loose her hat, knocking down her long, long hair, knocking her off Aristotle's shoulder and to the ground like a lifeless lump. "Alek is a fool..." Again the hand, a spurt of blood too dark for human broke from between her split lips. "You cunt..." He took her by the face, took her again, took her so hard he lifted her off the ground like a child's doll.
Kill you, Alek thought to Aristotle, standing nearby and watching, the eager-dog look plastered all over his bleeding geek face. Kill you like Takara. Rip you fucking apart...
He tried to lunge with what was left of his strength. Nothing. And now Robot scarcely held him.
Amadeus turned around and whispered to Robot: "Hold him up so he can see."
Robot did. Proudly.
A real challenge, eh, Robey? Holding a semiconscious man upright so he could watch a woman being tortured? You're such a man...
Amadeus flicked his wrist. Again the blade, glowing like an evil blue light, ghostlight--
Again the lunge. Alek felt it surge through him from some dark inner place of strength--
He moved, made it a foot.
"Hold him, God damn you!"
SSSliiit.
A fistful of Teresa's beautiful auburn hair fell in a heap of silky red-ebony at Amadeus's feet. The Father's eyes stayed barren, no feeling there. Just an act of fucking barbarism, like anything else in his life. He went to work again; again he robbed Teresa of her wonderful hair. And when he was done there, her hair cropped, he went to work on the front of her coat, slicing away the buttons--shucking the material off of her like a hunter skinning some great animal of prey of its pelt--so she lay on her back on the gravel path in only her black slip, her neck and arms bare to the cold and her assailant. Alek couldn't help but think of her stories, the freaks and psychos she had endured, beaten at their own game. Did you know it would end this way? In this ignominy? Again her eyes fluttered and the muscles of her neck and arms tensed as she tried to swim to the top of consciousness.
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