Part 6 (1/2)
Amadeus touched his cheek.
Alek flinched and looked up. He hadn't perceived that the man had even moved. ”It is the morning of your ascension, my most beloved,” Amadeus said, his fingers melting against the thin bones of Alek's face as if he would mold them as everything else.
Master...my dear sweet Creator, Alek thought helplessly as Amadeus's fingers fell down over his eyelashes and down farther to the mark on his throat. And then his lips were there, briefly, making Alek's skin s.h.i.+ver alive with the familiar intimacy of it. We are the most important part of each other, he thought with serene wisdom. He's right; we're married to each others' destiny. Never before, he wanted to say, never before have I felt this. But in the end he did not, for he knew it was a lie.
”Finish your affairs in the world this day,” said Amadeus. ”Gather yourself and the things most you value. I give you today. And then you will come to me at midnight in your faith and your loyalty and I will give you the Dominatio, and it will be my greatest act. Verstehen?”
Alek shuddered within and without. Dominatio. To absorb another vampire's soul through the ultimate partaking of blood--to become that person, to let that person become you. For a moment his whole being rebelled against the concept. So much so, that he almost s.h.i.+ed away from the Father's touch.
But the Father was patient, as always. ”Do you trust me, mein Sohn?'
”You know I do. It's just--”
”I shall recede.”
Again he shuddered, but this time in mind-numbing horror. Recede in the Dominato. To let one's soul die...
Alek held his master's eyes.
Amadeus smiled as he pressed the habit into Alek's hands, and when his voice came a moment later it had no fear, purred, in fact, with perfect fulfillment, the finish of a promise too long denied. ”Go now,” he said, ”yet return to me, my beautiful slayer.” Alek nodded and turned to leave his cell, to do as the Father had requested of him. But in the end he faltered, one foot upon the threshold, and turned back abruptly. Desperate. Was there any way to show this man his grief? Amadeus. Father, brother, his best friend in all the world. He would never know how much his child wanted to die for him. But because he could not, because it was not his time to die, Alek only returned to his master and kissed him, a gift and a covenant.
Then he left.
”Mister Knight?”
He'd been watching the girl on the street corner for almost twenty minutes. Punis.h.i.+ng heels and phony bloodred hair lying limp and cold on her leathered shoulders. A wood crucifix at her throat. One of the children of Adam gone to darkness and running. A child of the night now, though her black mascaraed eyes would not s.h.i.+ne in the dark and she would not live forever. Perhaps a few months on the brutal back of this devouring city. No more than that. Somebody's daughter. Sister, even.
The girl posed for a pa.s.sing john in a blue sports car and Alek noticed that beneath the girl's cheap rhinestone-encrusted jacket her thin, cold little dress was red. Red.
Debra's color had been red.
But Debra was gone-- ”Mister Knight?”
He let the chintzy curtain fall back over the window and wandered back across the studio to the galley where Eustace was helping him pack boxes. Not that he needed the help, mind you. All the important things he'd managed to collect outside the Coven would probably fit into half a dozen suitcases. The rest the new owners of this hole could have, the evil green sofa and the Formica and cinderblock coffee table some SoHo residents called shabby chic industrial, the card tables and the faded bedsheets and the rest of the mess he'd managed to make of his human life.
He looked at the few things of importance here, his tools of the trade, easels and canvas stretchers--and the pair of commas he'd never learned to use. The ring he slid onto his first finger. Maybe sad, all this, he mused to himself, watching the tarnished gold flash in the harsh overhead light, but then, what were possessions but chains to bind a soul to earth when he might fly--?
Fly with me, Alek, please?
Debra. Her voice. Her plea from so long ago.
He closed his eyes. Begone, Debra, he prayed. Torment me no longer. He waited, hoping breathlessly for the voice to fade, then let out a long sigh of relief as her special laughter eddied away into darkness inside him.
His eyes ached as if with headache and he felt a strange, lagging sense of disorientation. He looked again at the ring, tried to twist it off, but now it was stuck, d.a.m.nit.
”Mister Knight, sir?”
His blinked and the undeparted faraway feeling cracked at the edges. Shaking away the remnants, he regarded the debris of his life scattered across the counters and the tall young man placing it all with such gentle reverence into brown boxes.
Trying to make points with the new authority, a cynical part of his mind whispered, though he knew for certain it wasn't the truth. Eustace just wanted to please. He was simply too d.a.m.ned honest and too d.a.m.ned simple to have any subterranean devices.
”What's this, Mister Knight?” he asked as he held up an object.
”Alek, please.”
”What's this, Mister Alek?”
He smiled, took it from the boy's hand. ”Tortillion,” he explained and brushed the rubber tip against the boy's nose. ”You use it to rub lead into the grain of the paper for a better blending of values.”
”Laws,” said Eustace, taking it back and observing it like a newly discovered species of otherworldly life.
”Don't got nothing like that in Morningvale. Why do you get better value mixing lead with grain?”
Alek shook his head, almost amused. ”I'll teach you sometime. Like to draw, son?”
”Sure. Houses and horses and things. Whatta these?”
Alek reached across the island and took the shabby deck of cards from him. ”Tarot. They tell the future.
Sometimes. Though not for me. A friend gave them to me in the summer of '69. Everyone was into it back then.” He riffled the cards, came up with the High Priestess, the conceiver of mystery. Truth be known, he seldom consulted the Tarot; the cards never seemed prepared to reveal anything of any real importance. It was almost as if they knew him for what he was and resented the fact that to tell his future would occupy them for far too many years.
He scowled over the top card, one finger ringing the High Priestess's portrait with her casually juggled moons and stars. All wrong. When he'd split the deck he'd antic.i.p.ated the face card of the Hermit to embody the new position he would be entering into tonight--at the very least the Hanged Man for his act of surrendering his professional life, such as it was, to a priest's order. The cards were probably as muddled as ever. He set them in a box. Useless things...
He squinted as his mind swelled suddenly with the dark shadow of laughter and a promise of grief. Of revenge. Debra would do anything if it meant returning to him to wreck her vengeance, anything at all. He felt her hands on him, he felt his own heartbeat in his left hand, he felt-- Eustace spoke his name with some concern but he scarcely heard the boy. He had to drown that f.u.c.king little-girl laughter, drown it before it drove him insane. He went to the cupboard and poured himself a three- finger whiskey, downed it too quickly and scorched his mouth raw. He threw the gla.s.s tumbler into the sink and watched in satisfaction as it cracked into a dazzling rain of false diamonds.
He laid his forehead to the cupboard door and moaned. Sean was right. He was coming apart. Tipped. Hmm.
Some Covenmaster. He wanted to weep, almost thought it would help, but he knew from too much experience that his tears might fall forever but they would bring with them no relief or release.
”Mister Alek...Mister Alek, you look badly ill.”
He shook his head. Carefully. There was an abrupt, sullen ache like a stab wound in his left temple. He touched it meditatively. Migraine. Half-head. Come to me, he pleaded. Please, come and destroy me or else go and leave me in peace...
But Debra remained an ambient ghost, always prepared to torture him but forever beyond his reach and command. Fool. He was a d.a.m.ned f.u.c.king fool to believe he could summon her. Debra, wicked Debra. In life she'd been an unbound vampiress the likes of which even Amadeus could not hold back. But in death she was a G.o.ddess. Why did he try?
Vermouth. White Horse. Wormwood for the brain. Anything was better than this madness.
He tried to twist the ring, failed. Felt like it was f.u.c.king soldered onto his hand. He wished he'd never found it or that d.a.m.ned doll. I should throw 'em off the top of this building, he thought. Or maybe the Empire State. Yeah, that'll work. He lifted the amber bottle and saw with horror that it was empty. When had this happened? It had been half-filled only a moment ago. He looked at it long and hard as if the image would change suddenly like an optical illusion. But the bottle remained stubbornly empty. And his headache was worse, so much worse.
Female laughter crested in his head, as rusty as h.e.l.lish old bells.
It hurt so bad.
He was supposed to go to Amadeus as a priest in just a few hours and there was no hair of the dog to make him right. He was all pain, all laughter, all bones and hair and ragged fabric like a doll with faulty craftsmans.h.i.+p. Amadeus would touch him and he would simply fall to skeletal pieces like a smashed jigsaw, his pieces scattered across the length of the Abbey like the fragments of the tumbler at the bottom of the rust- yellow sink.
”Oh f.u.c.king h.e.l.l...” He turned around and checked the time. The clock over the sink was only now plodding toward ten. He had time to visit Sam's Place, and if he did not he would make time. He dropped the bottle into the sink and swayed past Eustace and his studio and all the f.u.c.king repulsive Bosch jobs hanging from the f.u.c.king repulsive walls, all the women with black steel cable hair and the machines eating their makers, and if this didn't make him right, G.o.d help him, nothing would.
”Mister Alek?”
He paused partway up the hill and looked back down at the Village. What once had seemed quaint and glowing and as opulent as stained gla.s.s only looked tired and defeated. Overindustrialized.