Part 11 (2/2)

Too cool for words. Sean grinned at the slayers watching from across the table, his tongue lolling. Takara looked interested in the exercise, but Booker onl y cup ped his chin and looked away. Spoilsport. Sean grabbed up the poker and crawled out across the table toward the big squirming tank. Fifteen in all. Fourteen now--mambas, black and green, slippery coral snakes, pygmy rattlers. He laughed and stirred the Medusan brew with the poker. The snakes knotted and writhed.

The rattlers gave a cold warning whicker of their tails.

He'd noticed these f.u.c.kers before, of course, sleeping under rocks in the big tank in a corner of the Father's cell. He'd even seen the Father handling them once, his thumb hooding their little angry heads, coiling them around his neck like the most experienced Kamir snakecharmer Sean had ever seen on TV. But they'd been pets, he thought, pretty f.u.c.kin' weird pets, but pets nonetheless. Or so Sean had thought.

A particularly energetic rattler jumped at him like a spring. No time, man! The motherf.u.c.ker was gonna-- Amadeus caught it by the throat. It coiled up around his wrist and attached itself to his forearm. Amadeus grunted and pulled it off, thrust it into the tank with its brethren. He spoke softly as he worked the tank, his voice tediously slow and his hands featureless blurs, and Sean listened intently to the words.

12.

”Christ, I can't carry on like this. I need a drink.”

”You need salvation.” ”Shut the f.u.c.k up. You don't know what I need. I need to get the f.u.c.k away from you!” He stood up violently, only to weave against the wall with disorientation and the pain blooming behind his eyes like a migraine.

He steadied himself. Then he headed down the alley. Out there, on the avenue, came the rea.s.suring sounds of traffic and people and businesses open after hours, crime and pain and life and death, but at least they were human sounds, normal sounds, the sounds the real world made. He looked despondently around at this backalley s.p.a.ce he was trudging through like the drunken b.a.s.t.a.r.d he was, the garbage littered wide and the rusting Dumpsters and the subterranean skitter of rats fighting over a burger wrapper under a heat grate somewhere and wondered for the thousandth time how everything had gotten so hopelessly f.u.c.ked up in only a few short hours.

”And now?” Teresa said, d.o.g.g.i.ng him even now.

He shook his head. He wanted to rage at her, but he had no strength. None at all. ”I don't know.”

”You know.”

”What do I know?” he said ”That I'm a corpse waiting to die.”

”You know that with the Chronicle you can stop them. It can be your security, your saving grace.”

”I don't know s.h.i.+t on a Tuesday,” he said, leaning heavily against the corner of the building. Taxis and limousines coasted by, their winds.h.i.+eld wipers screeking rubbery against the rain of diamond-hard droplets falling upon the city. Rain now. To freeze the snow into marble. He wondered when the winter would G.o.dd.a.m.n give it up already. ”I don't know where the Chronicle is. I never did. Debra knew and Debra is dead.”

”Paris knew,” she said. ”But Paris never told me.”

He put his hot cheek to the soothing cold brick. ”Which leaves us absolutely nowhere, Sister Teresa.”

”But how did Debra know?” she asked. She took him by the arm, the desperation only barely contained in her voice, in her steel-gripped fingers and wide, light-refracting eyes. ”Who told her? Who were her friends?

You must know something...anything...”

He closed his eyes and shrugged. And gi vi ng up, her prisoner completely now, he supposed, he told her what little he did know.

”There is a woman I once knew”--Amadeus deflected a coral snake, s.n.a.t.c.hed the head off a green mamba-- ”a great keeper of books and strange lore. I think”--he caught the head of that problem rattler, crushed its skull in his palm--”if anyone knows the way, she”--another rattler, a third mamba-- ”will.”

Amadeus stopped. The remaining snakes had retreated to the bottom of the tank. The rattlers were silent.

They had given up at last.

”Again?” Sean asked expectantly.

”Enough.”

”D'you know? Y'know, don'tcha? You know where he is?”

”Yes,” said Amadeus, sliding into his robes. ”I know.”

”Righteous, man!” Sean gripped his master by the sleeve. ”So we can, like, kick his a.s.s from here to--”

Amadeus dealt him a two-finger cobra strike to the throat.

Sean flew across the length of the table and crashed into his chair, overturning it again. Supine on the Abbey floor, he moaned dazedly, coughed, felt the two tiny puncture marks at the base of his throat. s.h.i.+t, man, that was going to leave a h.e.l.l of a scar.

Yeah!

”Hodie mihi cras tibi,” Amadeus hissed.

And though Sean did not understand the words, the sentiment was clear enough.

Mine.

Night.

Night in a club at 3:00 A.M., the time of the abyss, when the children of men slept and everything was neither here nor there. The club was in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a burned-out brownstone, so most of the light was lost in the greying wood and rusted steel that rose more than seven stories into the night.

Night in the Abyssus. The walls, painted black, crawled with arcane characters and g.a.n.g.b.a.n.ger badges in black spraypaint. On one wall was a religious mural of the Crucifixion done in rusty red and brown tones.

The club was located near the docks, so even here the cold fishy stench of the bay invaded, pervading the warmer scents of cheap perfume and melting hair mousse and clove smoke and fresh flesh and blood. The pit in the center of the club was filled with men and women entwined with their brethren, faces flushed with l.u.s.t and languor, heads thrown back in the grimace that was so like agony.

And on the tiny stage enmeshed in dogwire, presiding over it all like a high pagan priestess, she sang. She was like the victim of a vampire's obsession in silk gown and no shoes and naked arms ringed in delicate wreaths of barbed wire, and she sang much the same way, clinging to the microphone as if the weight of life and pa.s.sion around her would drown her damaged soul. She gave strange performances, alternately whispering her taboos and screeching them as if she would tear open the fragile fabric of the night around her and let in every wayward earthbound deity.

They said she was a fallen angel, the infamous Eleventh Scholar. They said she drank the blood of children and offered the kiss of purgatory to virgins.

They said a lot of things about Leigia, not all of which Salvatori believed. Though he did know for certain that the boss lady had a thing for Leigia and she was strictly no-go territory where he was concerned. He could respect that. He supposed he had to.

Leigia finished her last set to a sizzling roomwide silence and climbed down off the stage. Sal shot her down a whiskey sour full of cherries, her favorite.

Three o' clock and the Abyssus teemed, just like Sal liked it. Lots of heat and teenagers, more goth than anything else here. Black hair and albino skin, red mouths and smoky grey eyes. Black paten leather.

Painfreaks and vampire groupies and, sure, plenty of regular lowlifes too. A roomful of Cyndi Laupers and Boy Georges three days dead, a few geeks, the bearded poet type in worn army surplus jackets who quoted Nietzsche a lot, but he liked it; it was home.

Sal drew down a quartet of beers with enthusiasm. He'd be working at The Hole (as the patrons obstinately called it) for twenty-eight years now and it was a big deal. Talent night Tuesdays and Fridays, industrial metal band on Sat.u.r.days, blood orgy almost every night. Boss lady ran a tight s.h.i.+p but gave good benefits, decent pay. She and Empirius had made a good man of Sal, who'd seen nothing but tommy guns and bloodshed and human ghouls high on visceral violence most of his life.

Yeah, Akisha was okay, took none of the schtick the patrons who sometimes got high and rowdy after a band cooled down were apt to hand the barkeep. Even going so far as to install a couple of human familiar- heavies at the back door. Pip and Kyle. Wussy names, but Sal wasn't fooled none. Pip was an Outback brawler with Lou Ferrigno's face and Mike Tyson's left hook; Kyle was no better--an ex-Navy Seal, he'd eaten army privates for lunch during Desert Storm, or so the stories went. Some fancy work back there.

Yeah, Akisha was a fine woman indeed. And Empirius--well, s.h.i.+t. Sal spat on the floor and crossed himself, first upright and then upside-down. It was just too d.a.m.n bad about the boss man.

But Sal also knew that when you were living life on the edge the way his breed were apt to do, you couldn't go around hanging your head all day and mourning the pa.s.sing of every vamp you knew. They died too fast.

s.h.i.+t, faster than some humans, the way the slayers culled the herd And anyway, it was Sat.u.r.day and Sat.u.r.days were a fine night. Plenty of controlled chaos, lots of overheated bodies and quick smiles. Everyone getting down and ready for Shrapnel's first set, Leigia warming them up, getting them heated and wanting more. Nights like these were G.o.dd.a.m.n magic. Blacklights poured down through a crowd of chainsmoking teenagers and cleaved like purple cream to the base of the raised altarlike stage in the middle of the Pit.

<script>