Amadeus reached down like a man about to touch the cheek of a sleeping woman and instead struck her with the sharp of the blade. Alek shuddered, pain felt. The marks were like tar on her cheek and throat. A profanity. A sin. All that white perfection marred like that--
Alek coughed and wiped away the blood that came off his mouth. Then almost suddenly he gave in to a vast urge and went down in the cold snow and cold blood mingling into an icy pink froth all over the altar. He knelt, his hands over the maw of the wound as if he would salvage what was left and hold it in long enough to fight one last time, one last time for her...
It refused him and only raced away.
He forced up his trembling eyes, made them focus through the gathering crimson dusk on the Sean face with its black Amadeus eyes. Its unfeeling eyes. Empty eyes. Voids. "Why--you--doing this?" he asked with painful effort of clarity. "Why can't you--let me--be?"
"Fool's philosophy," said Amadeus as he used his booted foot to kick Teresa over, and then brought the crushing weight of his heel down onto the small of her back. The bones of her spine crackled like kindling. Teresa let out a long, susurrating breath. "Things cannot be. Things must be made."
"Hate--you."
"Hush." He kicked her back over onto her broken back. "I drown in love for you."
"You're filth," Alek spat bloodily. "A plague--hope the prophecy--puts you back--in hell!" And with final, near-impossible effort, he broke from Robot's grip and crawled past Amadeus, toward Teresa's desecrated body.
Amadeus stepped on the tail of Alek's coat. "Foolish, my beloved. The prophecy has been rendered null."
Alek strained, but his bones were water, his blood air, and he collapsed with his face to the snow inches from Teresa's paralyzed hand. "Not true."
"It is." Amadeus took a fold of his coat and jerked him back like an evil dog on a leash. "Amadeus must die for the prophecy's sake. I am not Amadeus, I am der Neugeschopf--a new creature."
No!
"I am a hybrid."
Nonono--
"Crucify the whore, my slayers."
--NOOO!
Aristotle stretched her out on a patch of snow, arms out, legs set neatly together like someone in mid-dive. Teresa suddenly came alive and snapped her jaws on his arm as he was pulling back, and Alek felt his heart leap at the sight. "Bitch!" Aristotle spat. He cracked his fist and Cornell college ring against her cheek. More blood. More. Robot came next with a gym bag and set it down. Planned this, then, they had fucking planned it--
He withdrew a ballpeen hammer and a pair of iron railroad spikes.
Alek tried to shrug free from the skin of his coat, saw himself do it, escaping it like a moth from a cocoon, escaping it to wreck hell on earth on these fucking barbarians, but Amadeus took a fistful of his hair and wrenched brutally back. Alek fell in a crumpled, bloody heap.
He closed his eyes, buried his face in the snow and blood.
All through the work, Teresa made a series of long raspy noises, not human, not vampiric. Throat-scorching wails like nothing he had ever before heard. Like a soul being torn apart, spiderwebbed by a force it had absolutely no control over.
Then she fell silent and Alek opened his eyes, blinked them clear of tears. Staked to the earth at both wrists. Staked and held by iron spikes and awaiting the coup de grace punched through the heart to stop its immortal beating. The Old World method. The method before the eastern slayers had lent the west their katanas and their mercies.
Amadeus stood staring down at her, the last spike in his hand. He was speaking, speaking low and intimate the words of the Old World exorcisms. The nonsense. The gibberish in Latin. The unholy inversion of Last Rites. He crouched low, the words "Fucking whore" on his whispering lips, and Alek closed his eyes a second time.
Teresa's screamed, inside his mind and out, over and over like a machine.
He lay motionless, spent at last. His body was elsewhere and all he was now was what he could feel and what he could think, and what he thought now was how immortality was such an ephemeral thing. So tired. So old. All he wanted was to rise up and fly, fly, out into the night, because it would make the grownups angry and who cared if the grownups were angry? But Amadeus was straddling his body now as he had Teresa's a moment earlier and he was pinning Alek to the ground like yet another victim and now that was quite impossible, wasn't it?
Amadeus kissed his mouth and the chains of tears on his face. "Why have you done this, my most beloved?" he spoke to Alek's heart. "Why do you struggle? You clung to me once, a child in your fears and sadnesses."
Alek shook his head, once. "Deceived--me."
"I created you," Amadeus hissed. "I loved you best, you ungrateful child. Who could love you but I? You came to me a devil and I made from you an angel, and how do you repay my work, but with deceit and betrayal. I should destroy you for your sins, no? But I am overcome with love for you still." Amadeus smiled, drank the blood from off his child's cooling lips. "I created you. And I will create you again." He touched Alek's heart, wholly rejoiced. "There--only a beat away."
Alek spat the remainder of his blood in his master's face. But the beads of blood on the Covenmaster's lashes were simply blinked away like red tears. "My journey's end," he said. "My true temple."
NO! NOT YOURS!
Amadeus kissed him once more, almost sweetly, his sharp little Sean-teeth lancing Alek's tongue, gagging him. And within the wet, private universe of Alek's mouth he tasted of Alek's blood like a holy Communion. I will not die, he said. I refuse it. You were always in my visions, Alek, you who will be the greatest among my slayers. I will not be cheated of my promised one. Your psi will make me omnipotent; your body will make me eternal...
Lied to me! You said you would be no Orpheus. You said you would preserve only the Coven!
I am the Coven.
No, no, nonononoNOOOOOOOOO...
"Hush," Amadeus whispered as he combed away the ropes of hair clinging to his acolyte's frozen cheeks, kissed him lightly, almost fondly. Kissed him hungrily.
Alek felt nothing, every touch a distant ghost. Every thought foreign, lost in memory...
"Yes, yes." Amadeus undid the rabato at his throat and pressed the edge of the wristblade across the small triangle of white flesh there. A red crescent like a smile appeared, and Alek's dead body convulsed with horror. He closed his eyes. No, no, he wouldn't, he refused--
"You lie in the cradle between life and death, beloved."
No. And again no. And yet again NO! He wasn't afraid to die, not like Amadeus, not like his Father, who knew nothing, had learned nothing. Coward. He locked his mouth.
Amadeus cracked his palm against Alek's cheek, rocking his head to one side as if he were again a child. Steel in his mouth. Ichor. Bitter heart of war, love turned to venom, spillage, bad vintage. Amadeus kissed him urgently, shattered the flesh of his lips with his teeth. He framed Alek's face inside his stony hands. "You will honor my will, Alek Knight," he whispered and ran his fingers over the tears and blood, down his throat and over his heart. Under his coat. The touch. No. But it found his most vulnerable places and he couldn't help himself. He arched against his master like a puppet with its wires pulled taut. The fire was there as always, the goddamn hunger that no amount of slaying vanquished...
Amadeus leaned low so that Alek's mouth was pressed to the freshly opened wound and circled his arms around Alek's back. Blood rouged his lips and cheeks, bubbled up his nostrils. He tasted life, survival. The sweet sharp crimson fruit of paradise itself--
"Drink," said Amadeus. "Let me create you. Let me fill you and complete you with the life as I was always meant to do. Drink, Alek. Drink until I move within you."
No, he thought, no, goddamn you, don't you dare give in, even as the memories and the night and all the horrors brought jewels of agony to his eyes. He tried to blink them away, but where was his strength? Where was Debra? And did Teresa forgive him? Could she? So near, they had been, so fucking near--close enough nearly to touch the Chronicle
.
He groaned and wept as his body betrayed him and he licked his parched lips and bit the sweet wound, bit into it, seeking. Like water on a fire, no, wine in the throat of a dying man, a victim of the sun and desert--
"Yes, yes, my love..."
He strained and drank, afraid to move, to lose even a dropful. He clung to his master and maker and drank. And he drank, wondering what creature he and Amadeus were writ to be and who had set the benediction. He drank, wondering what part of himself, if any, would remain and if he would have the will above that other entity to remain and fight. He drank, wondering what he would feel as he slid down into the belly of the beast and he hoped to God and to Debra and to Teresa and to all those whom he had betrayed that he felt absolutely nothing.
Inside his white soundless sphere, Booker stopped in his pacing as if struck by an invisible barrier. His eyes moved analytically around the room, yet he recognized nothing, identified not a thing, as if the world around him had suddenly decided to alienate him.
On the muted television the lily-faced heroine embraced a beautifully horrifying Count Orlock, offered herself up as the sacrificial lamb for all the good of a 1920's mankind. Book could not find the metaphor and so he took up the remote and changed the channel to MTV.
He watched artists sing about their sorrows and felt himself drift, lost among it. He groaned and tossed the remote to a cushion of his fashionably noncolored love seat. He turned full circle, the room too large, turning too fast. Where was Alek? His brother when all the brothers had gone, his best friend in all the world and fucking beyond? He had to find him--had to.
Why?
Didn't know why. Had to--
Where? The city's a big place, fool.
Silly--he knew. Of course he did. He knew this time without Aristotle's insight and stupid suppositions. He knew--
The beginning place.
"Your empathy must be rubbing off, brother," he said and reached for his coat lying on the floor.
Tahlia cast the cat skull across the full length of her husband's office. It hit the gorgon-face shield like a missile and clattered to her husband's smoking couch in shards.
In a single sweep she cleared the desk of its homey clutter, blotter and banker's lamp, decanter and Roman amphorae, In Files and Out, Charles's tobacco carousel--which struck his favorite stuffed pheasant down from his perch, so what?--books and maps and the framed portrait of Charles the warrior in fatigues between two other men in a faded grey jungle half a world away. All of it in a noisy waterfall to the floor.
There.
Exhaustion displacing rage, Tahlia slumped against the edge of the desk, one hand in her sweaty hair and the other over her heart. You are long over the hill, Tally, whatever the face may say. Gonna give yourself a heart attack. Yeah.
"No!" she answered, and strange this voice: it was not her own. It was the voice of some other Tahlia, some younger Tahlia. The voice of the woman who had sat all night in a cafe on Columbus Street listening to bad beat-generation verse and rattling her glass and stomping her feet with the best of them as the rest of her withered and curled up like an old rose and died inside. The woman whose heart knew that Byron was never late, never in all their thirteen years late for one of their dates, and that late tonight meant something more than late. The woman who knew that like she knew these Beatniks and their lousy poetry but who was too much a coward to admit to it. The woman who had drunk herself into a vermouth-inspired stupor that night and then drove home to her converted loft apartment in the Brooklyn Heights and cried herself to sleep and stayed, aching, in that bed for three whole days, nursing the horrible knowledge she had like a disease. That woman, the voice of the woman ages younger and not a little feral with emotion, a voice armored in steel and war and all the things that were lost forever.
This new-old Tahlia sobbed, "It can't end this way, kid. Please, please don't let it end this way." And that Tahlia went to her knees in sobs on the floor of her husband's office with the pulsing pounds of gaiety just beyond the walls but years out of reach.
28
The moon rose and the carrion birds came. Slowly her wounds bled and steadily her pain increased. It seemed as if the nightwind were on fire where it touched her body and the sky was full of screams. The sound of the birds pecking at and squabbling over her bloody flesh--her wrists and her face and her bloody barren womb where the Covenmaster had chosen to send the final spike instead of her heart--was enough to drive her mad. The birds polluted her mind as badly as her body. All she had to look forward to was the rising sun, when the world would turn red and it would be over. She hoped it was soon; more, she hoped she felt nothing.
Time wore on. Breathing on her broken back was a nightmare. Existence itself was a greater horror. How she prayed to die, then, not for the first time ever, no, but never with such vehemence. She cursed God and Lilith and Paris and Alek Knight and all those who had sent her down her path of destiny to be here now in this living hell. She wept, feeling a horrible void of self-pity opening up beneath her and sucking her down its great length. Where was grace now, now that she needed it? Where was mercy? She had not disobeyed her God, nor her destiny. Only they had conspired to set her up against an invincible foe. There was no hope for the world, she realized. The slayers were worse than the monsters they chased. And they were spreading across the face of the earth, slowly, calculatingly, maiming and destroying, making a barren No Man's Land of her people's world.
Her people. They would never know the secret of their blood now. The secret of their true origin. Now, with the Chronicle back in the hands of the churchmen, they would never know safety again.
The birds found her inner secrets through the hole in her loins and she heard herself scream inside her own head, heard the ringing echo of her own tormented, skybound curses.
And that was when the man came and stood beside her in her darkness and her agony, the man in the cleric's robes. Not robes like now, finely-crafted and sewn with threads of gold. This was a cleric of the Reformation, the Renaissance. The learned, worldly cleric in rough black robes and a tarnished papal cross that was all he had to denote his statue in life. He was tall and lean, his long, white-blonde hair combed back carefully over his ears. She looked at his beautiful hands, his piercing black, pious eyes, and felt her heart stutter inside of her. She had forgotten the light he could emanate despite his darkness. The beautiful torment of his touch, his kisses. She had forgotten...so much. "Paris," she said through numbed lips.
He put one finger to his lips. Shhh. He smiled. My beloved. His eyes flicked aside to where she thought the betrayer Aragon must be standing. It was so hard to tell, pinned to the ground like she was. Lost in the dark the way she was. "Someone might hear," he whispered in his native Dutch.
"Take me home," she gasped in her native Italian. She could not remember Dutch. She could not remember anything, her pain was so great.
"Not yet," he said with gentle patience. And then he looked on her with such love that she could not find the pain anymore. It was as if he had eaten it all up with his gentle, wanting gaze. "My Teresa," he said. "Will you give up on yourself?"
She shook her head no.
Paris smiled and beckoned to her. "I'm waiting."
"I...no, Paris..."
The others might have heard her, except that Paris had cast the birds away and their escape was like thunder. She was sitting up, her hands torn and frayed to rags but set like stone around the end of the railroad spike protruding from her womb. She gripped it, her hands burning like wax around the cursed metal, and pulled the spike from her belly. It came out of her like the scream she dared not utter. She lay down again on the ground, for a moment so overcome with sickness she wondered if she would ever move again, if she couldn't simply pass this cup by. If Paris wouldn't simply forgive her and come get her.
Will you give up on yourself, my Teresa?
Somehow she managed to sit up again, to climb like a staggering victim of battle to her feet. Her back was
partially mended, but her hands bled. Her womb bled. She was hungry, so hungry. The iron's poison was still in her veins, but perhaps it had lost some of its potency. She took one step, and then she took another. She saw she was coming slowly upon the two who had crucified her. They were mere fuzzy black images, her vision was so bad. She closed her eyes and found she could track them better by their warmth. The slayers, the small one and the bully, stood a dozen paces apart and watching their master twine with Alek Knight on the ground before the carousel. She was closest to the bully. She withdrew Paris's knife.
It felt heavy in her hand, but to give up now...Paris would never forgive her. She took yet another step.
And then she was upon the bully.
She never did like the cross.
A silly, stupid thought, but the one that gripped his mind in the moment before it happened. Over the Father's shoulder, Alek watched the assault. Such a small, weak-looking creature, and yet when provoked she was like a battalion, unstoppable and extraordinary. He watched her sink the knife into the back of Robot's head, through skull and blood and grey matter, all of which exited the wound she made in a loose, chunk-filled geyser. Robot made a sound--a peculiar sound like a cobra taken from behind by a weasel, perhaps the only sound he had ever made in his whole long life--and dropped lifelessly to his face a mere dozen yards from Aristotle. And yet, so captivated was Aristotle by the Rite before him, the whole assault went completely unnoticed by him.
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