Part 10 (1/2)

But he didn't want to be a hero and he didn't want to be a sacrifice. And it wasn't fair, G.o.dd.a.m.nit. He wasn't some latter-day Arthurian adventurer. The sky hadn't opened up. No one had called him. No lady rose from the lake now with a magic sword and a mission.

Teresa appeared at his side. ”The ice--it won't be denied,” she whispered in his ear.

Heartsick, he looked away from the Prince, seeking Teresa's old eyes in the solid black mirror of the water.

”Why do you pursue this?” he asked. ”For what purpose? Even if it were possible to harm the Coven, why-- ?”.

”Walk with me,” she said, ”as if you have lived a thousand years and have no fear of me.” He did. And twenty minutes later he found himself sitting in one of the most exclusive restaurants in the city.

It was the kind of place the Village artists usually joked about having lunch at because they knew it would take two or three weeks of scullery labor or slinging hash just to buy a hamburger there. He glanced around the dark, muted interior and could hardly believe he was here, that the two of them had been let in, looking the way they did. All around came the clink of priceless china and cutlery. Limited art prints covered the paneled walls, and white-jacketed waiters moved as deftly as magicians around the tables. In the darkened room he could see tables occupied by high-power corporate and publis.h.i.+ng types sipping their Stolis and working the art of the deal. The restaurant had a strict dress code, but the maitre 'd had said absolutely nothing about it when Teresa asked for a table near the back.

Alek wondered, in a remote part of his mind, if he or any of the waiters and patrons would even remember them after they left. But one thing was for certain: her choice was far from haphazard. Slayers, by their very nature, avoided these pits of luxuriant human existence like the plague. Even Booker would not dine here.

Even him.

Teresa sat across from him, her eyes seeming to glow in the dark with a slow-burning inner fire. He found himself unable to look away. It was as if she were hypnotizing him. No, more than that. It was as if she were x-raying him, glancing through the layers of flesh and bone and blood and for a second time watching all the secret wormy things he kept inside and never showed anyone. And for the first time in his life he did not care because he knew she understood.

”Shall I tell you a story, caro mio? A tale to quell your incessant need to understand all things?”

He hesitated. To know--it would be yet another seduction, of course. She might not even tell him the truth, if a lie was what she needed to entrap him--to use him. Yet he would listen, wouldn't he? For no other reason than because he had no other choice at this point. Nowhere to go, nowhere he could hide from her.

Or from them--the slayers.

Teresa touched the surface of her water gla.s.s with one finger. ”A dream of a war, you see, is a dream of history. There are the heroes and the villains and the cowards, too. And sometimes there are G.o.ds among men, mortal flesh and divine understanding commingled like a man whose blood is mixed with that of demons.” She smiled, black eyes flas.h.i.+ng beneath winged brows. And now Alek saw the innocent eyes of a young girl, the sleek whisper of a garbadine wimple upon her shoulders, her fingers braided through with rosaries. Again, she touched the water's surface, and this time the spell broke.

”I was seduced from the very moment of my birth, you see,” she said. ”I was born in Sicily at the end of the Roman Inquisition in the years before the Reformation, the eighth of a vast clan of business n.o.blemen. And being the eighth, and tradition being what it was, it was understood that I would be dedicated by my family to the Vatican nunnery upon my fourteenth birthday. What they did not know, however, was that by the time I had reached that age I had murdered three villagers and two servants and drunk the blood from their ruptured throats.”

Alek blinked but said nothing. He sipped his water.

”My father--he was not my sire. And my mother, dead upon my birth, could tell me no secrets. I was appalled by what I did, yes, appalled as a good Catholic girl should be, but that did not mean I was struck so with guilt that I confessed my sins to my family or the priests. Tales of the Inquisition loomed, the dismembering of accused witches, the unimaginable torture of the demon-infested and those accused of acts of vampirism--these things were too much of a reality. I was a coward instead, and a murderess. I dutifully joined the Vatican monastery and put the ring of Christ upon my hand and took my vows and did my thirsty huntings with the rats in the peasant slums of Rome and Tivoli. I chose my victims with care: newcomers off the boats, the homeless, those priests who thought to buy me for a night. I was not caught. Through it all, I was never caught.”

She was whispering, and now he whispered as well. ”You--how did you exist in a monastery--this is impossible!”

She ignored his outburst. She said, ”I lied. I was caught, once. Caught by a priest in my act of murder. It was with one of the Castrati. The boy had wandered into my cell in the middle of the night, looking for something or lost. I took him. I was so hungry. And there he was, watching me from the doorway--”

”A...priest?”

”I flinched. I wanted to make excuses, say something to dissuade what he had seen, I was good at it, but clumsy, you see, but then--” Teresa lowered her eyes. ”Then--he joined me. His name was Father Paris. He was a foreigner from Geneva. A priest with the Order of Scribes. And vampire, as I was. A drinker of human lives. A murderer, like me. He drank the blood off my mouth. And then he made love to me, the corpse still between us. He was so pleased to have found another of his breed, so happy.”

He wondered if Teresa realized how uncomfortable he felt in this place. He wondered if this was some kind of test, to see if he truly belonged to the humans' world, or if it was a mere exercise to see how long his remaining sanity lasted. If the former, she already had his answer in the flesh he had slain for her not more than a few hours ago. If the latter, it was a test completely unnecessary, for there could be no question as to how far gone he was, to let her abduct him like this.

”I bound myself to Paris. We were married by a vampire bishop by the name of Aragon who dated back to maybe forever. He and Paris had been working together for years under the cloister of their enemy the Church, their nature unknown to the others, scribing the history of our breed's relations.h.i.+p with Rome--what history there was--seeking proof of our origins not as devils but as a people made by the Creator for a specific purpose. I joined them at once, transcribing great portions of their history into Italian, seeking rare texts, stealing doc.u.ments from the vaults that implicated the Vatican in a conspiracy to purge the entire world of every last vampire--anything that might help, anything at all.”

”The Ninth Chronicle.” Alek closed his eyes in defense.

She nodded. ”Aragon,” she said, ”betrayed Paris. The work he had done was never for his kind. It wasn't to save us from another purge. It was for the pope and his Inquisitors. Hundreds of years earlier the Church had uncovered Aragon's secret and had traded him immunity for his services as a scribe and an a.s.sa.s.sin. The Church was never so ignorant of us. Aragon had used us to discover the names of all the vampires who had taken shelter in the shadow of the Vatican.”

She hesitated. ”There was a new purge, a silent one. Many vampires were dismembered, disfigured and beheaded--they were the lucky ones. Many others suffered the same punishment as witches. The burning stake. Sewn into a sack with a snake, a dog and a weasel and sunk in the sea. Ground crucifixion. Other punis.h.i.+ng deaths. Unmentionable things.

”But because of Paris's work, some escaped. The Church was faced with the dilemma of hunting down all the survivors, a task that would take hundreds of years to accomplish. But, you see, their greatest weapon was always Aragon. In his pretense for peace with the mortals, he convinced the vampires to formulate the ordinances of the C ovenant . The Coven was established as police to curb the possibility of another purge and the movement spread on the winds of pure terror and desperation. The vampires saw the restraints of the Covenant and the power of the slayers as the only possible way of avoiding certain agonizing death at the hands of the humans. The Church was never so powerful. And Aragon was never so pleased.”

Alek blinked and looked up. ”And the Chronicle?”

Teresa sat back. ”It was buried in the vaults of the Vatican, where it remained up until 1962, when the Church began a series of reforms to modernize and resurface its image. In the process, it brought in a number of scholars to comb out and destroy the evidence of the 'darker side of Christianity' as they called it.” She narrowed her eyes gleefully. ”And one of those scholars was Paris.”

”He stole the Chronicle back.”

”You know the rest then,” she said.

He shook his head. ”I know only--” He stopped, the words dying on his tongue, the terror so great a pressure it stopped his breathing, maybe his heart.

”What Debra said?” she asked d.a.m.ningly.

11.

In the dream he walked down a hallway constructed entirely of human skulls like the tunnels leading down and away into the arcane catacombs under some of the greater older cities of the world. Rome--maybe Paris. Something slithered over his feet and he looked down and recognized it as an adder. He kicked it away and walked on. And near the end, silhouetted by a sunburst of careening light so great he was forced to squint, he saw a tall, gaunt figure all in black, with reams of glistening silken hair and eyes like white pearls and a smile like a blade. In its right hand he gripped the hilt of a sword, long and terrible, and that sword dripped blood like rain upon the stones of the corridor.

In its other, left hand, it held a trophy by the hank of its long, blood-encrusted hair, the unfortunate's face lost in deepest shadow.

And it was then and only then that Amadeus realized he was having The Dream again, the visual dream. A dream of sights, of light and shadow and the bruised places in between.

The figure s.h.i.+fted and the chaotic lights he had been half-blocking only a moment ago intensified, set Amadeus's tender eyes to bleeding with the sight of all that light in his life all at once. The deadly black figure laughed and held aloft his prize, letting that light reflect off the disembodied head's marble-white flesh and s.h.i.+mmering white hair and redness of death.

Death.

His death.

His death unrepentant, unabsolved.

d.a.m.ned.

Amadeus opened his mouth as he had each time upon witnessing the sight of his own destruction and cried out with the horror and the unfairness of it all. The years--centuries--he'd spent, saving his own soul, saving his most beloved's. And now this...

But there the dream ended and he awakened trembling and sweating, his sword pointing up at the blinding s.h.i.+mmer of light baking his tender sun-shunned skin, pointing it at the breathy tall figure standing over his bed. And for a moment he almost thought it was Alek and Alek's vengeance and he had a terrible desire to lower his sword. But then, once more, he remembered the great betrayer's work to undo him, to undo all of the Coven, all his great work, and he realized Alek was not here, was too great a coward to face him yet, and he held the sword unflinchingly on his target.

The figure's hands swept up in a defensive gesture as if to fend off an a.s.sault. The light grazed him and was gone. ”s.h.i.+t. Sorry, Father,” the master slayer Booker whispered in his booming baritone voice, ”I thought you were awake, is all. I didn't know...”

His watch--it was only his d.a.m.nable watch! It was only d.a.m.nable Booker! Amadeus lowered his sword and sat up in bed. ”What do you want?”

”I...there's someone to see you. In the parlor.”

”Who? Alek?”

”No.” Booker hesitated. ”A man, just a man. About sixty-five, seventy. Dressed like a whitebread banker.

Rich b.a.s.t.a.r.d. He didn't say his name. But he knew you, he said.”