Part 4 (1/2)

Sean's face sharpened wolfishly, a gem of saliva glittering with obscene brightness at the corner of his grinning mouth. He laughed. ”Ain't you never heard no b.i.t.c.hin' rap before, man? When you from, man?”

Alek dropped the coat off his shoulders, s.h.i.+vered as though he were completely naked now. ”1953,” he answered the whelp. ”And I'm afraid I'm not much into the moderns, Mr. Stone.”

”Stone Man to you,” Sean corrected him. Then he mellowed out all of a sudden. He laughed, eyed the stereo at the far end of the studio and the riffled collection of records on the table beside it. ”Man,” came the Stone Man's voice like a javelin, ”who the f.u.c.k is Joe Jackson?”

Alek shuddered, let it go, thankful he kept his real audio treasures--vintage original Blue Oyster Cult vinyls and Paranoid and Deepest Purple--under the bed. He went to the closet and fished loose his leather greatcoat and sword, briefly considered using the weapon on the stupid, unlearned little b.a.s.t.a.r.d, then thought better of it. It would only make a mess of the studio. ”No one you'd keep company with,” he said.

Sean watched him with feline eyes. ”Man, what is it you do here?”

Alek hooked a scarf around his neck, jerked it tight. ”Do?” He turned around. ”I sleep here. I eat here. I paint here. I do the things you do in a studio apartment.”

Sean yawned theatrically. ”Father said you got an 'old soul' or sumpin', so I guess you're like older than f.u.c.king dirt. Probably were here back when the f.u.c.kin' Redcoats landed, right?” When he received no reply to that a.s.sumption, he s.h.i.+fted his weight and put his dirty unlaced sneakered feet up on the gla.s.s coffee table next to an ancient veined Han jade amphora, something Alek's old boss at the museum had given him as a going-away gift when he quit to paint for Braxton. Alek held his breath, but the amphora stayed intact for the moment. ”So you do, like, what? McFarlane stuff?”

”Excuse me?”

Sean rolled his eyes ceilingward. ”You know, man, Todd McFarlane. You do comics or what?”

Alek pointed to the oil over the futon, a surreal Neolithic piece that had made the cover of Le Jour in Brussels two years ago and had gotten him that Braxton grant he'd very soon be bereft of if he didn't come up with something salable pretty soon.

”Yours?” the Stone Man asked.

”Yes.”

Sean studied it thoroughly a moment. ”You in counseling for this, man, or what?” he asked.

Alek slammed the closet door, a crack like a jagged hair magically appearing along the plankwood. ”I would very much hate to interfere with your methodical tras.h.i.+ng of my home and life, Mr. Stone, but are you ready?”

Sean grinned, pulled himself up with enormous ceremony. Like so many lanky young kids, he looked taller and more impressive on his feet: nearly six feet of squealing paten leather, jangling zippers and blinding moon-white metals. Delicate chains grew mystically from Sean's earlobes and disappeared up his nostrils. His eyes looked to be smeared with lipstick. As he moved, his coat slit open like a skin to reveal a wide link of bronzed trophy teeth hanging to the dead center of his dirty black T-s.h.i.+rt. Alek was almost ready to bet something antisocial would be suggested on that s.h.i.+rt, EAT THE DOG AND BEAT YOUR MOTHER or something to that effect, but in the end it was only an unimaginative Grateful Dead Reunion concert logo.

Sean's mouth twisted into a sneering grin. ”Smokin', man. Let's...get...it...on!” He narrowed his eyes to glittering black slashes, pinning Alek like a park punk thinking to roll some homeless sot.

Alek blinked and automatically threw up a thin impromptu field of mental protection as he felt something build in the room between them, something like the sizzling legendary forewave supposedly felt by the victim before the strike of lightning. No good. A desert-hot ghostly hand brushed past his cheek and punched the dust s.h.i.+eld of the Neolithic on the wall, sending two crazed zigzags through the Plexiglas that looked suspiciously like a couple of backward Z's. Initials?

”s.h.i.+t, man, did I do that?” Sean laughed a high, cackling laugh. The sound of it hinted at some soft, padded room in a high-end mental asylum for the criminally insane that was positively lurking in the kid's near- future.

Seething, Alek ripped the scarf on his shoulders away, lest it become an impromptu noose. Oh, he prayed, for a chance to escort the kid to Greystone himself. He remembered the prophecy and then reconsidered the possibility of it ever coming to that, if the whelp wouldn't be destroyed long before. By his hand or by another's.

Running a hand through his hair and down over his face, was.h.i.+ng away all his suspicions for the moment, he went to the alleyside door. ”Let's. Go. Stone,” he said, holding the door open for his young charge.

Sean stopped laughing and smiled quick and easy like a teenager being told he had full run of the world and had every intention of running it like an amus.e.m.e.nt park with free rides. ”Yes, ma.s.sah. Whatever you want, ma.s.sah...” he said, skipping ahead of his teacher and out into the night, nimbly, like a summoned strigoi or dancing demon loosened from a pit out of some remote corner of Dante's legendary h.e.l.l.

Club Bauhaus, like so many other exclusive demimonde of private pleasure clubs, was located a few miles from SoHo, in the middle of one of New York's older, shabbier Bohemian communities. The cab the two slayers had taken landed curbside to the nightspot just shy of ten-thirty. The Coptic Egyptian cabby looked none too thrilled to be cruising these outlaw streets at this hour. Alek gave him an extra ten for his trouble and ushered him along with an old traditional Cairo parting gesture, the tips of the fingers peaked at the brow and a slight stiff bow to signify the blessing of the Eye of Horus, protector of travelers far from home.

”f.u.c.k me,” Sean said, loping after Alek over the broken walk, ”You old as s.h.i.+t itself, ain't you?”

”Forty-eight, actually,” Alek answered distractedly as he strolled toward the looming black ma.s.s of battered brownstone at the end of this half-forgotten dead-end street.

”Hundred?” the whelp sneered.

”Years,” Alek said, stopping where a pile of ancient reeking garbage crouched in the curb and a length of dirty police line dragged in the gutter like a mark of demarcation. He looked up, past the rat-infested grime, and took in the sight of the club.

Originally an abandoned warehouse, the building had been converted into a dis...o...b.. several young ambitious capitalists a decade and a half earlier. But when that craze had died, so did the club. It pa.s.sed through several hands and incarnations before being bought by the present owner, Jean Paul, a Paris-born vampire with an indelible taste for real estate. After several months of interior redesigning, the dive had reopened with a new name and a new att.i.tude. Converted into a goth-punk haven with live music, a dance loft and an exclusive ”Members Only” lower level for those humans with more exotic tastes in entertainment, the club had quickly developed into the hottest place in the Lower East Side to hang out in and be seen.

As usual, a crowd of impatient patrons waited anxiously on the sidewalk outside. Most were wealthy, thirtysomething businessmen in fifteen-hundred-dollar lounge suits with young women in designer dresses and stiletto heels on their arms. The club catered to mistresses, not wives. Morals and convention were checked at the door.

Crowding them for s.p.a.ce were the goths and Generation X-ers with a great deal less money or hope. But just the same, here they were seeking a path and an escape in the club from what they saw as the rigors of Church and Government and whatever other inst.i.tutions they presently felt were cheating them of life and pleasure. Their look was a mix of black leather and faded denim, Victorian finery and post-grunge regalia.

Jewelry and makeup was cheap and slathered on in excess like a masquerade behind which these disillusioned children of the night might hide their true faces.

In many ways, Alek found himself sympathizing with the younger generation. Most were bright and sensitive young people trying desperately to cope with a world that had learned to hate its youth. Lonely and disillusioned, they had created a whole subculture not unlike the renegade youth of the sixties and seventies he was familiar with. But unlike those lost souls Alek had once known, these young people were basing their rebellion and inner culture on decadence and death and the overdramatized plights of the vampires they shared their world with. Their view of vampirism came from erotic novels and cheap B films, not the real thing. As he edged through their numbers, he uttered a silent prayer that they remain forever ignorant of the truth.

A three-hundred pound vampire nicknamed Erebus guarded the entrance to the club as jealously as the h.e.l.l hound he was named by his hive for. Dressed entirely in black, Erebus exuded an air of barely-restrained menace and arbitrarily controlled all admissions to the club. His word was law. Bribes meant nothing to him, nor did social standing or the flash of a badge.

Alek nodded at the doorman. The vampire crossed his arms--they were as thick around as Alek's thigh--and grimaced with a mouthful of sharply filed teeth as he took in the slayer's long hair and coat. So brave, and yet his eyes registered threat almost at once when he realized who it was. His smile fell, perhaps as he remembered his painfully close shave five years earlier. ”Jean Paul ain't expecting you, man,” Erebus boomed cautiously in his carrying ba.s.s rumble.

”Then announce me,” Alek said.

”You got an awful lotta f.u.c.kin' b.a.l.l.s comin' round here.”

”That's not all I have,” Alek said, lifting his coat aside for a split-second.

Erebus stepped back hastily, holding the door open for Alek and his charge with all the spirit of a true gentleman. He and Sean swayed wordlessly through the door and into the club.

Alek paused, letting his eyes change to accommodate the dim interior. The spare blacklighting and the swirls of tobacco and clove smoke made it difficult to see. The ever-present pound of industrial heavy metal played at the very threshold of pain made conversation impossible. Sean's whoop of bright-eyed excitement was silent in the hot, deafening roar of sound. For a moment it seemed possible that the whelp was simply going to shoot right into the ma.s.s of patrons and disappear. Alek caught him by the collar. Wait, he mouthed sternly to the kid. Sean's dazzling silver eyes narrowed. He looked about to protest. Sit, said Alek and pushed the kid into an empty seat.

n.o.body noticed them. n.o.body cared. The goths, the norms and those somewhere in between crowded the dance loft above and the promenade below as busy as insects crawling over a corpse. They moved frenetically to the eardrum-splitting rhythms of the house band, a quartet of body-pierced, tattooed delinquents who were either vampires themselves or were just keyed up enough on junk to have a similar predatory look in their eyes. Alek cared neither way; he wasn't here to talk to the musicians.

Accompanied by a backbeat that wouldn't quit, Alek descended the narrow stairway leading to the bas.e.m.e.nt, his nerve-endings afire at this level. At the bottom of the landing stood another figure beside an ornately carved door marked Members Only. Here was Mako, a small, slender male with near-mahogany skin and greased hair and too-wide of a smile. Though he looked no more exotic than an eighteen-year-old Asian- African mix, he was closer to a thousand. And a Moor. He loved cops no more than Erebus, but like the gatekeeper, he was wise enough not to court an affront with a slayer.

”Jean Paul in?” Alek asked the vampire conversationally.

Mako blinked, white eyes flas.h.i.+ng in his dark face as he took in the sight before him. A slayer. And he was asking if his boss was in tonight. Normally, the members of the hive were obligated to defend their master to the death from possible harm. But in this case, Mako had decided that discretion was indeed the better part of valor. ”Sure,” he said. ”Yeah. When's he not?” Then ”But he ain't havin' guests tonight,” the Moor added in his newly-acquired tough-guy Brooklyn slur as if for some last ditch effort at bravery.

”I'm not a guest,” Alek said, brus.h.i.+ng past him, ”I'm the Coven. Remember?”

There were a dozen c.o.c.ktail tables scattered about the private chamber of the master of the hive, with perhaps a dozen vampires and twice that many human wh.o.r.es and lackeys present. A bar and barkeep furnished the humans with wine and brandies and the vampires with bottles of some of the finest imported and domestic animal blood in the world. To the rear of the room, upon a small raised dais, was the entertainment for the night, the living crucifixion of a young girl by a small rat-faced vampire dressed all in black Reaper robes. For a moment, Alek was certain he would have to call a housecleaning; then, studying her more closely, he realized the girl being tortured was really a small slim woman dressed all in Alice in Wonderland frills, not a minor, and certainly not human. Gabriella, Jean Paul's favorite. He recognized her now, her lewd prettiness. Shrugging, he turned his attention instead on the patronage, and in particular, the tall aristocratic man in the white suit and red tie strolling toward him, bra.s.s-headed cane in hand.

Jean Paul. He had the disarming, boyish looks of the young-old Richard Geere and the fas.h.i.+on sense of a true Parisian--and was well-known in many circles to use both of them to his full advantage in business as well as pleasure. ”Quite the appet.i.te-whetter, is it not?” Jean Paul asked, indicating the bleeding body of his mate on the cross. As always, the hivemaster's approach was direct, no quarter given, like a man with nothing at all to hide.

”I wouldn't know,” Alek answered Jean Paul, looking away from the display. He was conscious of breathing through his mouth since the start, a reflexive action to keep the scent of blood from making him sluggish. An old trick of Amadeus's.

Jean Paul lowered his eyes seductively. ”A necessary evil, you understand.”

”How so?”

”Have you yet tasted the vintage, monsieur?” His hand snapping out, he snagged a c.o.c.ktail gla.s.s on a waiter's tray in pa.s.sing and offered the elixir to Alek.

Alek let out his breath and automatically regretted it. The stuff smelled disgusting, flat and lifeless and harshly metallic. ”Hart?” Alek asked as his Jacobson's organ was a.s.sailed by the abusive odor of the stuff.

”The most repulsive substance in the world, next to cow's blood,” Jean Paul said, taking a sip and making a face. ”'Tis shame it is as nutritious as it is. I'd much prefer to tear out the throats of the poor creature's murderers. But until the day the Coven is no more, we endure.” Jean Paul nodded toward the dais as he escorted them both to a table near the back, ”And we do the best we can to summon our desire,” he added with a smile that baited Alek's response.