Part 7 (2/2)

So did he.

And then suddenly they were high above the city where the lights s.h.i.+vered and millions of voices whispered, and without ever having left their beds. It was magic, and so easy. It was how the twins learned they could fly. They linked hands and pa.s.sed invisibly over sharp, lighted pinnacles, the thrill of vertigo tightening their hearts and throats and taking all the pain out of them because they were together now, in the only way they knew how, the only way left to them.

And when Debra dropped in a sudden burst of laughter, Alek followed her to see what had entranced her so.

She spiraled down and drifted ghostlike over a great wheel encrusted with hundreds of dark eyes. She dipped lower and then she was beneath the wheeled roof, slipping through a menagerie of painted wooden animals impaled on candy-striped poles, dancing through the strange forest before settling at last with a kind of sigh on the proud arch of the dolphin's back.

Alek watched her from a shy distance, envious, almost afraid of her because she was so brave, and loving her because she was absolutely everything, the beginning and the end, his life and blood and desire made real. His balance.

Afterward, Deb r a returned to him and carried him up over the carousel, and their innocent lovemaking was a dream of fluttery touches and gentle, searching kisses that left him breathless and so hungry.

They visited the carousel in Central Park often after that first night, always with Alek drifting at its edge to watch his twin stroke the silvery body of the dolphin and swim at its side like a sea maiden, her hair ribboning behind her and her eyes the color of molten earth. But then the dawn would come, inevitably, and the dream would end and they would awaken separated, Debra in her doll house bedroom fixed by big children playing pretend and Alek in his sterile cage where he could hear whistling walk the halls of McEnroy Home in the early morning like a malevolent spirit waiting on the full moon and the bloodsport attendant thereon.

Less than a month pa.s.sed before Debra Knight was returned to McEnroy Home. The mealy-faced McKinneys were reluctant to elaborate on their reasons except to say that their childless union wasn't quite the torment it once was.

Debra laughed that night as she turned full circle in their room, her bloodred camisole spinning like the scarlet wings of an exotic bird around her legs. Alek embraced her the moment she stopped and she kissed him and nipped at his ear in playful greeting.

”How did you do it?”

Debra laughed once more. ”Oh so easy, my beloved,” she said, casting back her head in delight, shaking out her hair. ”I used the Method, of course.”

The Method. The old technique just about every kid at McEnroy had used to dissuade a stupid pair of foster parents from adopting you: break a few china plates, clog the pipes, act crazy or just downright rude. But it was more than that: Alek recognized that immediately. No foster family sent you back this fast, no matter how badly you wrecked their house. And he was certain to remind her of that fact.

Debra laughed anew, full of the glee of revenge. ”I took their little bird and cooked it. It was absolutely delicious. Mrs. McKinney's expression, that is.”

He drew back. He felt pale, a little sick.

But then she looked at him and kissed him again and it was like in all the stories, but with the spell being made and not broken with that kiss, and Alek's love for her was too great for his revulsion and, finally, he kissed her back. But now her mouth was different, her eyes deeper, a shade wilder, and Alek felt he held some strange savage G.o.ddess in his arms. What had she learned the last few weeks? How was she so different?

He tried to search her mind but she shrugged teasingly away from him, both physically and mentally, and he was mystified when she climbed into the open bedroom window where the summer nightwind turned her gown to flames and her hair to a living cloak of sapphire darkness and smiled invitingly and put out her hand to him.

”Fly with me, Alek, pleeeease?” she pleaded.

Out there? In their physical forms?

”Debra, we can't!”

”Why?”

”What do you mean why? We can't! We just can't! It'd make the grownups angry.”

”Who cares if the grownups are angry?”

And he opened his mouth to argue, but there was no real argument inside of him, only fear, small and gnawing like a little mouse, and he was embarra.s.sed by it..

”In case you haven't noticed, there is a world out there, Alek,” Debra told him. ”And I want you to play with me in it! Right now!”

And so he put his hand in his twin's as he must, and they played in the dark with their s.h.i.+ny eyes that night as they would many nights afterward, hide-and-seek and tag and some strange game Debra had learned where you waited until an animal or insect was inches from your absolutely still hand, probing or sniffing it, and you could catch it so quickly it hadn't even a chance to panic.

But with that game and time the wildlife around the Home became boring and Debra guided him to the rabbit holes in Central and Battery Park and to the tenement backlots where skeletonized strays burrowed deep into Dumpsters. And she'd learned where the pigeons were and where to find the pond geese by night and the method of catching them and soothing them to silence with her touch and her whispers. At least until the night her little captured rabbit died of fright. Debra cut it open in curiosity and studied its strange and beautiful and jewel-like little organs, the jellylike s.h.i.+ne of its secrets.

”Do you see?” she said, pointing out its tiny, muscular heart. ”Without this its blood wouldn't move. It's like a machine, Alek, a pretty machine.” Then she smiled. And quite unexpectedly, she pressed the naked little beast to her twin's lips as if it was a Communion chalice and watched, pleasantly amused, as Alek writhed away from it with a mixture of revulsion and curiosity. She laughed at him, put her finger in the crimson pool and painted his mouth red. And this time when the chalice was pa.s.sed he did not balk but sipped carefully from the vessel of life, raw and delicate and hitter and wild.

It was a curious thing, not unnatural, exactly, only...unfamiliar. Animals were meant to be eaten anyway.

”I thought it tasted like pepper and flowers,” Debra told him afterward.

”What are we?” be asked her in response as they lay down together in bed that night, for though his belly was swollen and warm with their repast, his intellect demanded to be fed as well.

Her mind laughed at him and she called him a poor, miserable philosopher. She turned over and kissed him all over, making him laugh and squirm with the sensation. Finally, when her cold delicate little lips found the thicket scratch on his cheek he felt her stop, sip, drink the blood gently off his shallow wound as if she hadn't had enough with the rabbit, would never be filled. You know the word, she laughed.

He thought of the movies they'd seen, the sto ries in the comic hooks. Vampires.

Eww, no, she said. DemiG.o.ds, she said because she'd learned the word somewhere and it meant something like an angel.

After that it became the routine of their lives. The couples who were comfortable with their safe, beautiful lives habitually fell in love with and wanted the china doll beauty of McEnroy Home to compliment their pristine ivory houses. At least until she produced the red shade of death in their household, when she was dutifully returned to the Home and to Alek.

Still, the twins were together every night, even in their brief separations, because they could fly. And fly they did, over the city and through it, sometimes as ghosts and sometimes as demiG.o.ds, but always as mates, and with nothing to mar their dark, perfect happiness but the smiling nightmare of Ms. Bessell and the whistling.

9.

The girl was not Debra.

Why had he thought she was? A trick of the light, perhaps, or the fantasy of her doll-like, sensuous face floating before him, her breath on his throat. Those great dark eyes. But she was not Debra. And Alek understood with all the violence of an epiphany that he was about to die by Debra's doppleganger. Die. Slain by a creature with the body of an angel and the eyes of a lilith, and yet he could not move, could not rise, could not flee or start or cry out even as the creature placed her delicate long bony hands to either side of his head and tipped his face up, her makeupless old eyes boring black holes through his skull and far back into the most intimate chambers of his mind and memories.

So easy for her she was so old and talented: The Home. Debra. The b.i.t.c.h. The tears. Fear. Alone. Debra.

The McKinneys. Debra. Blood. Kisses. The Sheridans and the Forsythes and the Strakers. Blood, more blood, the will of Debra. Debra and the rabbit, the dead rabbit. Blood. The Coven. More blood, more.

Madness. Debra, Debra, Debra...

He jerked once near the end, stiffened like a corpse in the girl's hands. No. Please, dear G.o.d please, I don't, I can't-- He fell away from her emptily and hit the ground at her feet, face to the broken asphalt, prostrate before her because he neither had the strength nor the will to rise. She'd taken it all and he was bereft. He wanted to destroy her--needed to, if only to kill what she'd learned about him--but he would never pick up that sword again. Not now, not now--not when all its tragedies had been revealed to her.

Instead, he remained as he was, cheek numbing against the ground, his eyes open but seeing it all blindly, without purpose or control. All of it. Compulsively. From the beginning to the end like a horror movie played in fast forward. The blood. Bessell. Debra. Amadeus. The carousel. Debra. Debra. He wept. He didn't care now if the vampire reached for him in hate or in hunger and soiled the floor of the city with his blood. It was all right. It would at least be closure, the edges of his thwarted fate coming together.

He would be with Debra once more-- ”Mister Alek? My laws, Mister Alek!”

His eyes swept open, his head angling toward the voice, letting it drag him back to the present. The alley, already tight, stony black with graffiti and night, seemed to shrink further down around the wide, boyish bulk of the figure standing over him with such concern. Eustace. d.a.m.ned fool. Why couldn't the whelp just let him be? Why couldn't he just let his elder die in peace?

Eustace tugged annoyingly at his arm. ”Mister Alek, are you hurt, sir?”

Yes. ”Talk to me, Mister Alek!”

No. Leave me alone.

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