Part 1 (2/2)

The slayer s.h.i.+fted uncomfortably, turned away and began wandering among the tomes of Akisha's vast library, glancing at the swirl marks of fingerprints on ancient leather spines, the French and Portuguese and Cantonese gold leaf wearing to near unreadability. He let out his breath and sucked in the cottony scent of parchment and old oil paint and blood and s.e.x in the room. He sighed. He was suddenly weary. At the end of the room he turned around and studied the living fres...o...b..fore him. ”Tell me, have you and Empirius been fighting again, Akisha?” he began.

The young man stirred in his sleep and Akisha made motherly cooing noises until he was still again. She kissed his cheek like a young girl biting into a new golden fruit. She said, ”He is master, I am his wench.

What is there to fight about?”

The words were supposed to sound off-handed, he supposed, but the bitterness in Akisha's voice was unmistakable. In many ways, the slayer could not blame her for that. Vampire society was by its very nature a primitive, essentially patriarchal setup. Males guarded their harems of females jealously, with the bloodbound females forcibly dependent on them for protection during those periods called the Bloodletting which struck them annually and transformed them into creatures little better than frenzied lionesses. It was a condition that made them captive inside even the lenient circles of their own kind. Feminism and independence were difficult to cultivate in a race so dependent on its second half. Were something terrible to befall Empirius, Akisha would be forced to find another master to bind her or die on her own, unbound, within a year. She could have done worse in the slayer's opinion; she could be bound to a far crueler master than Empirius. She could still be bound to Carfax, who'd had trouble discerning the difference between friend and experimental guinea pig. So in many ways she was right in her rage, but wrong in its direction.

After all, to say she was cherished by Empirius was to say night is dark.

The slayer shook his head. ”You're being evasive, treating me like police, Akisha.”

”Are you in uniform?” She smiled with smeared red lips. ”I think you are. You are like the Stazi now, or the Gestapo.” She sucked in a breath, filtering a world of tastes through her Jacobson's organ, laying his intentions--including the forty inches of oiled steel under his coat--completely bare. ”Yes,” she said, her eyes slipping shut. ”Like Gestapo, the sword is almost drawn.”

It was difficult to guess if she was talking figuratively or not. The slayer approached her, his leather greatcoat drifting ambient as wings around his ankles. Akisha lifted her attention to meet him, her eyes gleaming in the semigloom as if she would welcome him to her little personal orgy if she could. If she thought he would stoop to that level. So beautiful were those eyes. Like black Caribbean pearls. The slayer went to one knee before the divan and put the back of his hand to her white cheek. He tried to see deep but Akisha's age and power prevented his penetration. Her motorcycle jacket was unzipped and he followed instead the chain around her neck to the miniature sickle of obsidian dangling between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. It glimmered there like a talon and he found himself all but mesmerized by it as he spoke. ”Are you in your period, Akisha? Tell me.”

Akisha dropped her eyes to her beautiful young victim. Like the others, a swan, a crimson swan. Yet he breathed, his life's rhythm steady and sound. A look almost of profound insight seemed to hover at the edges of his expression. Undoubtedly he was having the deepest, most evocative dreams of his young life. Like some wors.h.i.+per of the waterpipe in a London opium den, a bomb could have fallen over the city and he would remain undisturbed in his mistress' playground of the mind.

”Does it seem that I am?” Akisha asked innocently. The slayer glanced aside and said, ”The city is understandably disturbed by these murders. Missing children, rumors of bodies picked clean of meat, of blood. The police are calling it Vulture Murders. You can imagine.” He found himself whispering as though her victim were a young child in need of his sleep. And surely he was; how else would he endure yet another night of so dark a pa.s.sion with his mistress? The thought caused a stir deep in the slayer's belly and loins that he put aside immediately as ridiculous emotional shrapnel from another life. ”This thing--it could have repercussions. The stories...I'm only seeking the truth.”

She watched him intimately. She smiled. So near and tainted with her lover's life and her face gained a wistfullness the slayer sometimes wondered if only he ever saw in it. ”And so the Coven sends forth their gallant knight-errant to slay the dragon. How old-fas.h.i.+oned. What about the other possibility? This is New York. Human beings are still capable of deviant behavior, or has the Coven forgotten that?”

”That possibility exists,” he admitted. ”I'm not certain if they suspect someone or if they merely feel the need to investigate. But either way, it's become my problem.” He stopped speaking.

Akisha was reaching for him. He closed his eyes and followed her presence as it closed in on him over the p.r.o.ne body of the child. It glowed darkly, her presence, like a living cloak. He s.h.i.+fted his weight and moved his hand down an inch. He automatically brushed the hilt of the sword under his coat.

Akisha's bitterly-sweet lips hovered an inch from his throat. ”You still don't trust me, do you, Alek?” she said. ”So long I've known you, known all your secrets and not spoken a word. But you will not trust me...”

He waited in defiance of her words. No razor-sharp instrument slashed his face or cut his lip or throat. He opened his eyes and there was just Akisha in all her cold black and white beauty, waiting without patience.

He shook his head and looked away. ”You have the Book of Deborah on that shelf over there,” he said.

”One of the Apocryphal books. It was edited from the final text of the Bible in the Tenth Century by King James.”

”You are changing the subject.”

”No,” he looked up into her proud exotic face, ”this is the subject.”

”What? Censors.h.i.+p?”

”Yes,” he said. ”No one ever gets the whole story. Only fragments, rumor. But rumor is dangerous. A rumor can destroy a man. Or a species.”

Akisha locked her jaw.

He touched her hair compulsively. Oriental silk. Real when so much else was not. ”Tell me the story. Tell me who is murdering those children. I have to know, Akisha. I can't walk away otherwise.”

”Empirius,” she said, closing her eyes, ”does not harbor rogues.”

”Perhaps he does not know this one well enough.”

”Empirius knows everything about everyone.”

”Then perhaps he is being set up by someone wanting his downfall?”

Akisha laughed. ”With Empirius gone I would be sole ruler of the vampires here until I became again bound.

My period is in three months. Do you think I am doing all this terrible murder so Empirius is ruined and I am widowed and powerful for all of ninety days?”

He shook his head at her wryness and wound a lock of her hair around his finger. He sensed her cold--her sudden thrill of fear for him because he was one of the few threats she still continually faced in her unchanging, uncomplicated life. ”I think you know much,” he said. ”You always did.”

Again the innocence like a little-loved veil seemed to fall all over Akisha's face. Her sudden look was feverish, almost desperate to speak. And yet she held it all in perfect disciplinarian check. ”I think,” she said after a moment, ”that you should join us tonight, unseen. I can tell you no more than that.”

As the slayer wandered down the streets he noticed men and women walking past on either side, completely unaware of what moved in their midst.

It was late Sunday afternoon and the tourists were emerging from Broadway matinees and dinner at Mama Leone's and being safely bussed back to their suburbs in Jersey and Connecticut. There was a young mother with a little girl standing outside of the Winter Garden Theatre where it seemed Cats had been playing forever. The little girl, whose eyes had been turned forlornly at the wintry grey sky only a moment ago, suddenly dropped her gaze and centered it on him.

And for one spare moment he saw himself through her eyes--long black scarecrow hair, leather longcoat, the undulating sensuality of a black snake that she had seen in a school film only a few days ago--and he caught himself like a vain man with the annoying habit of studying his reflection in every facade of gla.s.s and mirror, and tucked his conscious eye back into the pocket of his own flesh.

Her eyes widened. What did she see? Only a tall strange man all in black? Or was it death-in-waiting? If only he could know. The girl turned to tell her mother, but already he was gone, dissolved back into the irreverent current of society where the carpet of concrete could usher him along anonymously toward the place where all his decisions would be made in only a few hours.

”The day before He suffered to save us and all men, he took offering in his hands and looking up to heaven, to you, his almighty Father, he gave you thanks and praise. He broke the bread, gave it to his disciples, and said: Take this, all of you, and eat it: this is my body which will be given up for all of you. When the supper had ended, he took the cup. Again he gave you thanks and praise, gave the cup to his disciples, and said: Take this, all of you, and drink from it: for it is the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me.

”My people, let us proclaim the mystery of faith. Our Father, we celebrate the memory of Christ, your son.

We your people and ministers recall his pa.s.sion, his Resurrection and his Ascension, and from the many gifts you have given us we offer to you, G.o.d of glory and life eternal, this holy and perfect sacrifice: this child of G.o.d who is now the body of Christ and the cup of eternal salvation which is His life's blood.”

For a moment Empirius glanced down at the child bound to the blood-blackened altar at the center of his club. The look clouding the child's eyes was one of utter doom. Not forced worldly misery as like so many of the children which visited the club and mingled with the d.a.m.ned, but true bone-quaking fear. Empirius smiled on him in the smallest, most meaningful way. Then he took up the steel knife lying beside the chalice on the pall and, with that gesture, dragged the instrument across the boy's throat. Blood pumped out of the open wound, was.h.i.+ng the altar stone, darkening it farther. The child frantically gulped as his life pulsed out of his body in thick almost-purple pulses. Empirius placed the chalice under the torrent of blood and filled it halfway to the rim with the hot crimson liquid. An audible sigh, almost as great as a sung note, ran through the congregation of vampires gathered for Ma.s.s as the air became charged with the radiant fragrance of life eternal.

”Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, and said, ”Take: eat, this is my body, broken for you.” And with that and a surgeon's precision, Empirius sliced deep into the meat of the boy's side.

Alone in the aftermath of Ma.s.s--by now the others returned to their warrens and city apartments--Empirius knelt down before the altar and sipped the remaining blood off the stone. The warmth entered the frozen labyrinth of his metabolism like the merest whimper compared to the raw primal roar of a true feeding, a true death. No matter how many times he tried to convince himself that the mechanics of this outlet might indeed be the redemption he and his people had been seeking so long, he could never overcome his contempt for the process, for the policing of slayers and the Coven and all the things that existed to deaden the rage of the hunt to him and to his fellows. Cursed by memory and by age, he still recalled in his private moments the sweet burning red rage of the predatory hunt and kill, the food of victory. For all the many miseries his state of existence had cost him, the days of mankind's ignorance and the vampire's absolute freedom were ingrained in his makeup for all time, never, never did he want the memories to fade, the l.u.s.t to let him go.

Even as his fingernails dug into the soiled stone and his lips sought even the smallest warmth remaining, specters of past victims surrounded him, mocking him with their ultimate victory: The great and ancient Venetian vampire lord Empirius, and here he scrabbled at the blood of the dead like a starved creature!

He sat back quite suddenly. A door had closed at the back of the vacant club, the sound as great as a gunshot in the silent chamber. In the corner of the catwalk that circ.u.mvented the pit a figure materialized, dark on dark, too dark for even Empirius to recognize it at first. He jerked backwards a step and narrowed his eyes.

”Who's there? Akisha?” he asked hopefully. ”Sal?”

The slayer stepped forward formally, a hand on the hilt of his sword in the event Empirius drew a challenge, and began the slow descent down the grilled steps into the pit. It would have been over much faster in a surprise affront, the slayer knew that--faster and far tidier--but nowhere near what he wanted. A dead vampire, no answers to his many questions--no. ”Ah...Master Alek.”

The slayer sighed heavily. ”I thought perhaps it was one of your young thralls, one of their perversities,” he whispered. ”But you?” He tilted his head. ”Empirius?”

</http:>

<script>