Slayer

by Karen Koehler

  Teresa pulled the knife loose from the sucking cavity of the slayer's skull and put her mouth there a moment, taking some nourishment from the wound. Then she took a few shambling steps forward, and, with her resurgent strength, plunged it into Aristotle's back. Aristotle wasn't so silent. Aristotle screamed bloody murder, falling to the ground and scrabbling at the gravel path like a cockroach some poor fool had impaled on the floor of his Bronx tenement apartment.

  Amadeus jerked away and turned. "You," he whispered the word like a snake hissing a warning. And then he let loose with a torrent of almost tangible psi force.

  Like a block of mortar cast into a peaceful stream, the shockwaves rippled out. Alek felt it in those first seconds, the spun web of terrible force spinning out like a net, the threads of living violence collapsing the foliage around them, rippling the earth and seeking its victim. Carnage. A canopy of rickety maples crackled inward in a cavity, pulverized as if a great and invisible giant had passed there. A cannonball of wild energy ricocheted off the street between two stalled cars, cratering the asphalt, then crossed the avenue like a skipping stone and burst against the face of the Metropolitan, tearing down the Horses of San Marco banner. A small awry sphere buffeted past Alek and bounced around the inner canopy of the carousel in dreamcatcher pattern. And in that moment he thought of himself and Sean in another close place in another time with Sean's psi a demented wraith seeking its return current. Alek saw the force go to Teresa like a speeding subway train, like a trained pit bull terrier set loose on its hapless victim. Teresa raised her arms, but it would never be enough, never.

  Alek closed his eyes, opened his mind to Amadeus's stolen psi. He called to it sweetly and softly. And like a fish it sought its birth fount.

  The energy struck Amadeus squarely in the chest. Not like a fish. Like an iron musket ball.

  The force split the two of them apart like a hammered bone, struck Amadeus from the stage and cast Alek in the opposite direction, into a straight steel panel of the carousel house.

  Hurt in his skull and eyes. His stomach, oh God, his stomach. Alek blinked and then dropped over into the track, touched his face to it in agony as the venom churned like steel knives in his belly. He tried to feel himself, but himself was like a distant character he no longer had any interest in. Red, searing pain. Black despair. Loss. It was as if those two colors were the only ones left in all the world. To die--perhaps then he would be free of this pain. He arched and slammed his face against the floor of the carousel. The pain lessened, then came crashing back like a tidal wave. He fell to his side, immobilized by it.

  Darkness.

  From far away he tasted once more the shed blood of a goddess. Achingly sweet. Foreign but potent. Before his mind even knew it, his body was hungrily sucking up the substance. A swallow. And then another. Pain. But it was the pain of mending. The itch of recovery. After a few moments the flow lessened, and at first he thought it was because his body was running out of blood, but then he realized it was because his body was healing, turning back on its own strength, which should have been impossible with so much of the master's blood and will inside of him. Yet after a moment or two his vision cleared and he was able to see clearly again.

  Teresa lay beside him, feeding him blood from her own cupped hand.

  He shook himself. For a moment he thought it meant she was recovering. But then he saw that her horrible wounds had not healed at all. Her eyes halved, registering his sorrow but smiling even now. Even now, with her hair cruelly cropped and her face a map of half-healed scars, she was alluring and ancient and provocative. He wanted her, even in her curtain of red death.

  "Only enough life--for you," she said.

  He pushed her hand away. "No..."

  "You are only hope." She forced yet more of her blood down his throat, feeding him from the gaping red wounds on her wrists, forcing him to feed by stroking his throat like a child might a sick kitten, and it was suddenly as if the current of her life and the many lives she had taken and made her own was overwhelming the invading will. He gasped and swallowed, and he felt it die slowly within him. A warm silence stole over his body. He was certain the Father's venom in his system had been nullified. Yet inside he was still in torment. Even as he sat up, Teresa seemed to lose strength and lay back down. The wounds in her were massive and black with gangrene, the rot of the iron shot almost entirely through her system, and he cringed because he feared that if any more of her flesh was eaten up by this cancer that he would see her heart beating, or slowing down. He tried to open a wound in his wrist, to drip blood over her parched and broken lips, but she stopped him.

  "Too late," she said. She shook her head.

  Another death. Another death he could not bear.

  "No," he moaned.

  She raised her left hand and touched his hair. "Are you so afraid, caro?"

  The tears on his face were red. They would stain his skin, he thought, and he could carry those scars for the rest of his days, out into the world where people could see it. The slayers. The humans. The ones in between. All of them. He wanted to bury his face in her chest, but he was afraid he would hurt her more. So he took the hand she touched him with and he kissed it.

  His voice was choked. "You shouldn't have done this. I'm not worth it, beloved."

  That amused her. "I do what I want. And you do what you must. You are more human than you know. More human than me...or him. You are the new breed...hope. Yes." Her eyes focused on the stars, her breathing harsh and painful to hear. A spasm shook her body and he heard her heart skip as she began to die.

  Sobs racked his body. "Don't...please..."

  She looked at him with her usual impertinence. "...coming."

  He looked around, but there was nothing to see. No one coming. No one that he could see, at least. His heart hammered. "How do I stop him? Teresa! Tell me what to do!"

  "Her," she gulped, "she knows."

  "Who? Debra? You mean Debra?"

  "She always knew." A convulsion suddenly gripped her, and her body arched up off the floor. His tears were a river. All those deaths, all those years of the sword, had not prepared him for this. To see another lover die. Yet Teresa, with her failing strength, pulled his hand down and touched her tongue to the tip of his finger, a gesture so final and yet so erotic he felt the need for her to the very pit of his stomach. "She knows how--" A sigh escaped her lips and her eyes brightened like church glass with the sun setting behind it. Inside her chest he heard her immortal heart stop, but there was air left in her lungs and she said in that special soft voice of hers, "Mio amante, il Cronaca..."

  Those were her last words. She was gone, back to the fabled web from which all their kind were reputed to come.

  The world began to move like a filmstrip before his eyes. Alek stood up with Teresa's body cradled in his arms and wondered if the rage and the sudden loss had made him mad. No. Heat and life. From deep inside the carousel came a rusty long growl, the snarling of locked gears frozen too many years turning over, sparking to life, the carousel trying to move, enlivened by something, a stray bit of Amadeus's psi, he supposed.

  The irony of it. He felt a soft, salty laugh from deep within: Debra's savage joy, now his merciless own. Alek sneered at Amadeus, inside his mind and out. Didn't the Father see? He hadn't cheated the prophecy after all. The animals were running for him, and the midnight sun would shine and this was to be the last night the world would tolerate the existence of a monster.

  He jumped to the ground and set Teresa's body down. He stood up. He felt nothing. "Where are you?" he whispered. "You coward, you son of a bitch, where are you?"

  Nothing. Goddamn nothing.

  No--something. Something moved toward him in slow, agonizing, movie-mummy steps. Someone.

  He waited. And after several minutes the figure closed the distance between them.

  Aristotle, the iron knife still in his back, dropped to his face at Alek's feet.

  "Please..." He sobbed, scrabbled at Alek's boot
ed foot like a digging dog. "I don't want to die." His tears and snot had turned to ice beneath his chin.

  Alek picked him up by the collar of his slayer's coat.

  Aristotle hung limp and shuddering in Alek's hold. "It hurts..."

  "I know," he answered gently. He looked into the suffering depths of Aristotle's eyes. "So did she hurt."

  Aristotle shook his head. "It hurts so bad, so bad..."

  Alek shook his head. "You hurt her. You watched."

  Aristotle's eyes widened as if he realized what was about to happen and decided it was worse, far worse, than having an iron knife stuck in his back. He tried to move, but the poison was too deep in his body to allow him that kind of strength. It was no challenge at all for Alek to drop the kid and take his jaw firmly in one hand and to sink his fingers into Aristotle's mouth with the other and with one rending jerk to tear the top half of the slayer's head off his spasming body.

  The body flopped, bleeding and dying like an eel dry-drowning on the ground at his feet. Alek watched, unfeeling and unmoved until the body lay still and twisted in the crimson snow.

  Memento mori, Alek...memento mori...

  Alek turned to face the chilled phantom voice at his back and felt steel lick pass his cheek, draw blood like a vampire's kiss. He lunged away from the thirsty Hanzo blade and slammed into the carousel stage.

  He stood, rocked sideways, fell to kneeling, stood again as the king slayer moved in for the kill. Too much. Too fast. He dropped to his knees again and reached for and loosened Booker's tachi from his coat as Amadeus closed the six foot gap between them and started to swing his sword toward Alek's head. Above came a muddy rendition of "Stardust", redoubling in velocity like the track of the carousel. Seething, ferocious with hate and full of broken music, Alek reached blindly and snagged the hilt of the tachi. Waited--waited until the king slayer was within reach, waited until the Hanzo blade began to fall, waited until the last possible moment--then swung the sword at the beacon of pale face and hair.

  In one impossibly graceful gesture, Amadeus changed the course of his weapon in mid-fall, blocked the incoming blade with his sword, reached and took Alek abruptly by the front of the coat with his free hand and cast him shuddering into the stage again.

  Pain, but dim and distant this time. Alek got halfway up and met the Covenmaster's blade over his upturned face, the swords screeking down to the tsubas, holding, holding, Alek trying to push but no leverage, Amadeus smiling, trembling, holding--what was he waiting for?--then underbalancing the crucifix of blades and stepping aside as Alek pitched forward and rolled away from the descending Hanzo blade.

  Alek found his feet, his tachi slapped willfully around to meet Amadeus's sword edge to edge. They slid off each other, not war but ceremony. Alek danced back, then up to the stage, slipping between the animals for protection. He eyed this man, this thing he scarcely knew, and yet knew too well. "I loved you once," he whispered above the dull roar of the great whirling toy protecting him from the Father's blade, "but you took everything from me, you fucker, and now all my love is turned to hate."

  Amadeus hissed like a beautiful reptile. "What I took you gave me freely, you little prostitute." He smiled without emotion. He showed the tips of a pair of horrifying teeth. Not vampiric. Predatory. The teeth that had ended the life of Byron and a hundred thousand others, for all Alek knew. "You drooled for me; for your passion, you bled for me." His smile grew, a leer the likes of which Alek had never before seen. "You belong to me. And you will die for me. Come..." He gestured like an artist inviting a subject into his loft. Like a vampire welcoming a virgin victim.

  Alek was no virgin. He held his ground, pointed the sword at his master like an accusing finger. "So the church will absolve you and make you their favorite little dog again." He shook his head. "All those people you killed, all those fucking people. Akisha and Byron and Paris and Teresa. And you did it for the fucking church." Again he shook his head. "I think I hate you because of that more than anything. So don't call me a prostitute, you hypocrite. At least I didn't sell my will to the church. At least I have that much pride left."

  The white eyes narrowed. Amadeus twisted his head unnaturally to one side. "I serve the church and you serve her. We two are equally guilty of our passions."

  "At least when I say I did what I did for love and passion I'm not a lying cunt," Alek said and threw his weight against the blade through a break in the animals.

  Amadeus met and deflected the blade. Pushed him aside. Alek landed on his feet, turned, swung it slantwise for the Father's face, missed, but there--against the fire of violence there was a kind of double light. Amadeus stood back, his sword with its attached hand at his feet. He smiled and Alek saw no blood come. Only milky whiteness, only writhing shapes, sinewy shadows...

  "Christ."

  "I'm afraid not," said Amadeus, stooping to retrieve his sword and hand. He replaced the hand, and the white, bloodless flesh healed itself tight almost immediately. "Very good. You forget nothing. Now again," he spoke as if this were but a simple sparring match.

  Monster. Half-thing.

  They came together again and again, Alek strong, Amadeus older, stronger. The sparks they made were like embers glowing through the darkness. There was no way of winning, not fairly, not against a man who lived by the sword...

  Alek feigned left and threw his shoulder against the master. The two of them went down in a tangle of arms and legs and teeth and swords. The Hanzo blade came screaming up for Alek's throat; Alek palm-heeled it flat to Amadeus's chest. The blood of our enemy, he thought and exercised the weapons so much more natural to his species: he bit deep into his master's throat, shredding the minor artery under Amadeus's ear, growling and foaming the blood back out of his mouth and nostrils. He shook himself, thrashed, tried to peel the flesh away from that one vulnerable spot in a great wet chunk.

  Something insinuating slithered into the cup of his ear. Something else sank its needlelike fangs into his shoulder.

  Alek let his prey go, batted at the halo of death trying to enfold him--the serpents--he jerked back away, sliced at them with the tachi, or tried to, but the tachi was too long to work in such close quarters. The serpents lashed at him, tore at the flesh of his face, bit the skin on the backs of his hands scorchingly. He couldn't decide which was a worse noise, the cacophony of the carousel or the deafening hiss of the medusan crown trying to slice him to pieces. Finally, he lifted the tachi high, the hilt pointing down at Amadeus, and tried to bash his master's face in. Amadeus caught it. Twisted it.

  The snap of wristbones was like an explosion in Alek's ears. He felt nothing. Nothing but helpless as he relented his hold on the sword.

  Amadeus slapped him away, and again the ground met his back jarringly.

  "Sssilly boy," Amadeus said, smiling and reaching for the Hanzo blade on the ground beside him.

  No you don't.

  Alek reached for it with his one working hand. The blessing of the jonin, he thought, the sword that knew its master...

  Amadeus growled as the sword skated away from him and into Alek's hands. His face looked as ancient as some gift off his golgotha. He crept backwards away from Alek and smiled again a little as if from courtesy.

  Alek crept forward, the sword at the ready. He tasted blood, his mater's, his own. The warlust was on him now like a fever. Kill you. By any means necessary. "I will kill you," he whispered through the false carnival of lights and music. "Like you killed the others, demon. How many are there, how many wait for you...?"

  Amadeus stopped crawling. He looked briefly toward the carousel. "Fulfill the prophecy, my beautiful ssslayer," Amadeus invited. "Absssolve yourself." The thing, creature, un-thing, smiled and looked at him, past his eyes and into his brain to the place where there was always sight for him...and showed him the numbers, the souls who had perished at his hand, and the number was no hundred, nor no thousand as Alek had suspected. He was wrong. Alek saw them all and there were a screaming, writhing million... />
  The plan had worked perfectly, of course. Alek felt their anger, their million-power rage, and screamed and slashed his katana too early and without half his strength.

  Something happened, a spark, a scream of air--what? Alek knew only that his sword could not penetrate Amadeus and had returned to him, his shoulder, not a stab, a slash, deep, too deep, too much blood and pain. All of it drove him to the ground on his face. Icicles of laughter impaled his wounded mind and made him moan--Sean Stone's heckling, stolen and transparent.

  Alek shook once, violently, and looked up.

  As the animals undulated and turned, he saw Amadeus standing against them, against the false lights of carnival. The switchblade again: as long as a wakizashi, it pointed down at the ground from his sleeve. Some awful enigma, thought Alek as he recovered, this ancient man and his modern weaponry.

  "You broke my heart," explained Amadeus as he charged forward and brought the weapon down in a glittering blue arc.

  Alek, seeing this out of the tail of his eye, jerked sideways, and instead of penetrating his sternum, the slender perfect blade sank into his wounded shoulder, pinning him to the ground.

  The Father bent low, his face white, a mask of envious hurt. He wept. He said, "Does it hurt?"

  Alek coughed blood, shook his head, felt only dark, deep pressure gathering within him. "Fucking bastard, you killed Byron...made me kill Debra. Your spell...you did it to her. Always your game. Why did you hurt her?"

  "You loved her," said Amadeus. He twisted the blade, withdrew it slowly. He licked its greasy red single edge, smiled painfully in his tears and rouge of blood. "You kissed her and touched her and put your filthy, unrepentant hands all over her. You would have run away with her. How do you think that made me feel? Did I mean so little to you, Alek?"

  Alek closed his eyes. His body was stone, immovable. Where was his sword, the sun? There. Maybe ten feet from his outstretched hand, the steel all blue light, the hilt a white bone. Too far, God help him, he had no fucking strength left! "It wasn't any of your business," he whispered. "Why me? Why do you care? Why won't you let me go?"