Part 11 (1/2)

Her eyes darkened, reflected all the entwining lights of the rink. She watched a couple fumbling along, find their rhythm side by side on the ice. ”The art is open. People learn so much faster. Evolution.” She looked at him. ”That's what Paris used to tell me.”

”He died--was killed,” Alek said. ”I remember the name.”

”He was murdered in 1962,” she said, ”by Aragon--Amadeus.”

Alek digested that. ”And you believe this?”

She narrowed her ancient, holy eyes. ”Yes, caro.”

He heard the lisp of her accent now, the pain in that other life. He stared into the ice like King Arthur awaiting an answer or a purpose. ”Why me? Why choose me? Revenge?”

She turned him around so his back was to the crowd, so he saw only her, and slid her narrow hands up his lapels. Very strange that touch, part priestess, part lover. He leaned into her instinctively. ”You want to corrupt me,” he guessed, ”to hurt Amadeus--”

”I want only the Chronicle. That is my revenge.”

”I don't have it. I don't know who does.”

”You know. You have only to remember.”

”I don't understand--” His head swam. ”You're using me, seducing me.”

”Do you mind?”

He kissed her mouth in response, drawn to the s.h.i.+ne of her skin, the darkness in her eyes. He touched her hair, wors.h.i.+pped the waterfall of it through his fingers. His heart pounding in his ears, he kissed the curve of her cheek, the perfect line of her throat, her delicate wreath of collarbones. No spell now; only her, only this.

He felt her swallow, gasp, heard her say: ”I have watched you. I love you.”

He sighed, let her go. ”You don't know me. You don't know what I've done--”

But she was not listening now. Her gaze was turned away from him, out over the frozen water as if it were again the Pond where the Prince undoubtedly continued to turn his harrowing circles in a vain attempt to save his life. He heard it now too: Conflict. Human conflict from the street, the blare of a horn, several horns. A gunshot. Human voices. Human noises of pain and surprise and horror.

”Wait for me.” Her hand covered his heart as if she meant to spell him. He watched her as she skated to the edge of the rink and unlaced her skates and climbed the stairs back up to street level. I love you. Wait. But she no longer touched him and that made her sorcery weak, too weak for the sudden panic that she would leave him to suffer alone with these unwashable memories.

He waited a moment, but just that, and then he went to the edge and tore away his skates and jogged up the stairs after her. A considerable crowd of tourists and locals had gathered at the corner of Forty-ninth Street, just outside an all-night deli, jabbering and mulling like a pen of confused wildebeests. He glanced in through the green-tinted window at the brightly-lit interior of the deli, at the refrigeration units and spilled bottles and boxes, but the cause of the commotion was obvious. And even had it not been, he would have known by the coppery stench of the interior and the bloodstain still wet and running on the wall behind the counter.

He closed his eyes. She wasn't far. Pulling his coat close, he muscled his way through the milling people and up the path towards Fifth Avenue. Halfway there he turned off onto an alley between a fenced apartment building and an industrial warehouse. He walked softly on the gla.s.s-littered fissures of broken asphalt, shaking his head as if that would clear away the memories of Eustace's death in an alley so like this one.

Alek breathed in deeply. She was near. Behind him, just beyond the elbow in the alley, came the resonant high-low of young voices at war. Alek edged around the first turn.

Two boys were standing over the body of another boy lying against the brick wall of the building, his head bracketed by graffiti. Spools of blood ran freely from the knife work on the boy's cheek and hands and ribs.

Alek eased himself back automatically into the shadows.

”I mean, no hard feelings now, Jimmy,” one of the two other thugs said, a tall black boy with a s.h.i.+tkicking expression on his stone-hard face that reminded Alek uncomfortably of the Stone Man. He flicked his steel stiletto closed like a circus trick. ”You're just a living f.u.c.k-up, you know?” he said with a savage steel-toed kick to the downed boy's ribs.

Jimmy jerked, wanted to beg or curse, but his pain was too great and he could utter only a pale long moan through the clots of blood in his mouth. His eyes gleamed black in the semigloom; he wanted so much to escape the pain but the blood only ran more swiftly from his ruined body.

”Survival of the fittest--just ask Darwin,” a second boy, his white T-s.h.i.+rt spattered with gore under his cowboy duster, added. He laughed at his own clever wit and pulled out a Cuban import, inserted it under Jimmy's ribs, and pulled the trigger twice--whomp, whomp--the sound m.u.f.fled and toylike against the jerking, suffering flesh of Jimmy's stomach.

Standing in the shadows some twelve or fifteen feet away, Teresa looked on with a shrewd, impatient understanding. Alek blinked and wondered if he was imagining all this, but there she was, motionless and unseen with only the glint of steel in her eyes to mark her position. The two punks turned toward him. Alek slid back a mere moment before they--or Teresa--would have seen him coming up on their blind side.

Like a couple of loosened spirits, the boys shot past him and down the mouth of the alley to where a battered lowrider was double-parked in the curb, hooting like a couple of athletes in the winner's circle. Teresa watched them go. Then she drifted forward like a beautiful plaything brought to horrifying life. She chose not to pursue the two of them; instead, she looked down on Jimmy. The boy was dying slow, his wet, s.h.i.+ny eyes turned up on her, on this lovely angel fallen to earth to frighten off his tormentors. He raised his hand to her face and she took it, fell effortlessly to one knee at his side. She cradled his head and drew his slashed palm to her lips and tongue. She whispered the sacred words of the rosary.

Jimmy closed his eyes. He said he loved her.

She leaned over Jimmy's face, held Jimmy's hand as she kissed the wounds on his face one at a time and took the last of his life through them. Jimmy's hand grew soft in her grip, fingers slackening, curling, lips parted in some final word or prayer. And when she was done, when she drew herself up, Alek saw what a fastidious creature she was with only her radiant flush of stolen life to paint her porcelain face with color.

She turned to look at him. She said, ”I told you to wait.”

The sound of her voice broke the spell that held him. He stumbled back against a wall of the warehouse. He saw the boy. Jimmy. Whose son? Who would know he was dead?

”Don't,” Teresa said. ”It makes for useless pain.”

”You said pain makes you strong”--he slid down the wall into a crumpled, oily pile--”once.”

Her eyes dropped away. She looked at Jimmy, touched his stony, lifeless cheek. ”You want to hurt me. I understand.”

”Those other boys...” He shook his head, was not surprised to notice he cast tears from his face with the gesture.

”I will have them in their time,” she said. ”'For everything there is a season--'” ”He trusted you, G.o.d d.a.m.n you!” be sobbed.

”He stood with his friend when he pulled the trigger on the grocer,” she said self-righteously.

Vampire, he thought at her with the weapon of his mind. Monster.

She looked up at him out of her dark and hallowed face. ”My righteous child, life and death are not always as they should be. He was dying, the life running out of him. But now he will be a part of me forever.”

”But he believed--”

”And it comforted him.”

”You betrayed him!”

”Him?” She rose up and swayed toward him.

Alek shrank from her, turned his face away until the brickwork burned cold against his cheek. He sobbed loosely. No. It was over. He couldn't go on. He thought of the whelp he had just murdered. Eustace. And the dozens--hundreds--before him. Hundreds. He was a hypocrite and d.a.m.ned and he could not help himself. So be it.

He sensed her withdrawal and her sudden misery. So many years. So many faces. How did she live with them all? How the h.e.l.l was he supposed to? Her voice, bitter and ancient, was as reedy as the rain when it came: ”At least I never denied what I was. At least I had that much pride left.”

”f.u.c.k you,” he said, screamed. He covered his face and wept until exhaustion and fear overtook him and he felt nothing at all.

Amadeus caught the rattler by the head, deflected its fanged attack with a deft underhanded strike. The snake recoiled, returned to the bottom of its tank in defeat. Sean saw the black mamba go for an opening. Sleek as an eel, man, yet the Father trapped its black, poisonous head inside the cup of his palm like a man stopping a fastball in mid-flight. The Father crushed its head, tossed the crumpled ribbon of its body aside.

b.i.t.c.hin' cool, man. Beautiful Saimin--f.u.c.king--jutsu!

The Father crossed his wrists and prepared himself for the next series of attacks. He was naked to the waist, his flesh oily white, flawless but for the colonies of bite marks striping the insides of his arms like the needletracks of the junkheads Sean had known in the system. ”Again,” said the Father.