Part 12 (1/2)

Sal fixed a couple of triplehammers and shot them down the bar at the two kids with carefully scarified faces and links of chain sewn through the tender skin of their scalps. One, the androgynous girl, Sal thought, smiled. Maybe later, sweetheart, he thought to her. Onstage the long-haired, body-pierced members of the band were tuning up and getting ready to serve and command their people like a cliche of black-eyed underworld G.o.ds. None of that battle-anthem streetbeat stuff to start with; Shrapnel was a sophisticated barbarian. Kill me, eat me, suck me dry, then do your brethren, my little brothers and sisters. G.o.d, but it was too righteously cool for this jaded new millennium.

Sal was shuttling off more beers to the waitress when he saw Knight come in. Over the years he'd seen the full gamut of goth, overpainted lips and overbled skin, that forced worldly look the kiddies put on for their brethren. But Knight was a regular scare, even in Sal's book. Not goth. Knight was the real thing. And a slayer. G.o.dd.a.m.n f.u.c.king slayer. Knight looked around a moment as if to re-familiarize himself with the joint, and in the shadowy dimness of the club his eyes looked huge, black as sin, as if he were absorbing every last particle of light in the place. f.u.c.king cat eyes.

Sal b.u.t.toned up the neck of his white oxford s.h.i.+rt and wondered who was next on the chopping block.

Knight looked his way.

”s.h.i.+t.” Sal stopped shaking the tin cylinder for the kahlua he was making as the slayer headed in a bee-line for him. Big guy, was Knight, the typical artist type, long fingers, longer hair. But unlike the other creative fifty-year-old lushes in the Village Sal knew, Knight spent his nights wielding steel and pulsing and sieving members of his own f.u.c.king breed. There wasn't a soft spot in his whole unaging body. Sal's eyes moved self-consciously to find Pip and Kyle.

Maybe trouble.

Kyle nodded, folded his big he-man arms across his grey fatigue tanktop.

”Salvatori.”

Sal set the kahlua shaker down before he dropped it. ”She ain't in,” he said automatically.

”She's always in,” Knight responded. ”Remember what I said about you f.u.c.king with me, Sal?”

Sal shuddered and looked away. ”Leave her alone, will ya? Haven't you done enough damage here?”

Knight looked taken aback by the outburst.

Sal thought to kick himself. Real good, Salvatori, he thought, you're a total Einstein. Probably it's going to be your f.u.c.king neck attached to your f.u.c.king big mouth on the line now.

But to his utmost surprise, instead of reaching across the bar and making Sal intimate with that oversized pigsticker of his, Knight looked down and away. ”Would you buzz Akisha please? I'll understand if she doesn't want to see me.”

”Huh?”

”Please.” He looked up, his eyes inky. A tear? ”I need to see her.”

Sal shook his head. Poor f.u.c.ker. Akisha was great about everything down here--but upstairs was a different matter completely. No one saw her without an invitation, except maybe Leigia, and even there Sal wasn't certain the dame could just come and go as she pleased. It was Akisha's only vanity. And she certainly wasn't going to want to see the face of her bound lover's murderer. Still, he mi ght a s well make a show of it, just in case Knight was hauling that pigsticker around with him; he picked up the phone and buzzed Akisha's office on the twentieth floor.

”Knight wants to see you, Mistress,” said Sal. ”You want I throw him out?”

d.a.m.n his courage! Was he going f.u.c.king crazy in his old age? he wondered.

”Knight?” came Akisha's slithering voice.

Sal glanced up at the slayer. ”Yeah, big guy, black hair--you know, the one with b.a.l.l.s enough to show his face 'round here after carving up the Master?”

There was a lengthy silence. Sal could hear the static on the phone. He could hear the breathing of the slayer.

He could hear his own breathing. It was like a f.u.c.king Carpenter film. He'd scream if Akisha didn't say something pretty soon.

Finally: ”Send him up to my lounge, Sal.”

Well, this is something new, thought Sal. He hung up the phone numbly. ”Go on up,” he told the slayer.

”Twentieth floor. Stairs at the back.”

”I know.” Knight nodded and smiled, showing the tips of his pet.i.te but still impressively sharp set of eyeteeth, almost like he wasn't embarra.s.sed by them. Then, without aplomb, he crossed the Abyssus to the back to the service stairwell and started to climb. And it was the d.a.m.nedest thing--it was as if he'd expected no other reaction. 13 The erotic image of a woman lying back on a purple divan, red heat lamps set in the wall giving her flesh a warm, rosy semblance, was the first thing to greet Alek when he entered the lounge. Her upper arms were prisoners of coiled reams of cruel-looking barbed wire, and he felt immediately an unfamiliar ache in his teeth at the sight. She stared at her image in the ceiling mirrors and reached down to run one b.l.o.o.d.y hand down the front of her diaphanous white gown. ”You came,” she whimpered as if drunk or stoned or in some mystical way operating far outside her body. ”Akisha said you would. She said...your touch is like steel.” She nodded solemnly. ”I love Akisha.”

He tried to ignore her; even in the red of the lights he could see the razor scars all over her body. Hundreds of artistic markings like tattoos, each one the stigmata of a pa.s.sage, a pa.s.sion. A pa.s.sage toward what? A pa.s.sion for what?

”Death,” said Akisha, emerging from the darkness and into the halflight of the lounge's oval stained-gla.s.s window, the diffused, bluish light of it turning her flesh transparent under her scarlet Jean Harlow-inspired nightgown. ”Death and rebirth.” Long matching evening gloves covered her arms, and a choker of white diamonds that had once belonged to Elizabeth Taylor was around her throat. Her spike-heeled mules hardly made a sound on the hardwood floor as she moved.

Alek looked again at Akisha's girl. She emanated a scent like steel and roses so that he had to make a conscious effort to completely ignore her. ”Does she know that nothing you do can make her any different?

Does she know how different we really are from them?”

Akisha tipped her head, her peltlike black hair falling forward to brush the hollows of her cheeks. ”Close enough to mate, but not close enough to turn one another?” She arched a black eyebrow, then turned to face him fully and grace him with that rarest of her gifts: her predatory smile. ”I don't think Leigia knows much of anything right now.”

”You should tell her. These children--”

”And lose yet another lover?”

Alek grunted in agreement and walked to the room's old-fas.h.i.+oned French windows. He opened one of them and stepped out onto the balcony where the air was so much fresher and colder and more open. He looked out over the dark distant ma.s.s of Central Park. On the far side he could just see the lights of buildings on Fifth Avenue. Akisha came and stood in the doorway behind him, and for the first time in years he felt truly old. Like the city, he would live forever, but unlike the city, and Akisha's girl and all the other mortal children in the club downstairs, he would never truly be a part of this world's vibrancy. Not this world--not the Coven's. He had traded in the church's redemption for the chilled eternity of the rogue. He almost thought he would go and be feeling sorry for himself again, but he realized he was tired of growing sentimental over city lights.

The moon was fading fast from the sky and he felt a sudden need to call it back, to raise his head and howl aloud to it like some fool Lon Chaney-inspired character in a creepshow. All those years exerting control and a priest's restraint, and yet, buried deep, he was hungering all along as badly as the worst of his race. He closed his eyes and felt the cold nightwind brush his cheeks and wondered what new madness this all would take him into.

”I am sorry about Empirius. About Carfax. All of them. Every one--I can't tell you...” His voice trailed away uselessly.

Akisha reached the parapet rail that ran around the balcony and stood a short way off from Alek, looking out over the city. ”So it's happened, has it? You've been awakened.” Her voice--it was less like that of a seductress and more like a friend, some old friend from the distant past, someone surprised but not really angry to be remembered only now, in a time of need.

She turned to him, the gems gleaming and reflecting the red of her gown at her throat. ”Tell me what happened, tell me,” she said, sliding back against the rail. Like her choker, her eyes gleamed cold, but in them was the suffering wisdom that came only with long life. The wisdom of sorrowful experience. Akisha had been witness to empires crumbling and returning to life a dozen times; nothing he could say would shock her, or could.

He opened his mouth, and like a confession, he found himself recounting the events of the night leading up to his arrival here at the Abyssus. He spoke carefully and calmly, leaving nothing out, and doing his best to appear impartial to it all. As he talked, Akisha grew serious and thoughtful, but she neither questioned nor interrupted him.

And then finally he was done and she stared at him evenly but said nothing. And the silence was too great and he turned back to the city and gripped the rail until his fingers hurt and he said, ”I don't know where to go, what to do. I thought of you. I thought of what you did for Debra. You were someone she trusted. I thought maybe...I don't know.” He looked up. ”Maybe she told you something. Maybe she knew where the Chronicle was or knew who did.”

Akisha watched a pleasure boat moving up the Hudson. ”I don't know that there's much to know. I don't know that it even exists.”

”It exists. I have to find it. Without it...it's just a matter of time before they come. And I can't fight them all, I can't do this alone, Akisha. Please.” He heard the pitiful whining of his voice and despised it, and himself for being brought down to this level--begging help from one of his victims.

Akisha moved along the parapet rail so she was closer to him. Her voice was soft and breathy. ”You are not alone. You were never alone. You have the sword. You have Debra.”

He shook his head in denial. ”I'm so afraid. I don't think--”

”Then don't, little whelp,” Akisha scolded in j.a.panese. ”Don't think. Feel. Do what you must in vengeance, not fear, never that.”

She moved even closer to him, and Alek suddenly wished that she hadn't. She was stirring emotions inside of him and his feelings were quite complicated already. He closed his eyes yet again, putting the veil of absolute darkness between them, but her perfume was all but overwhelming. He thought of hot airless nights heavy with jasmine, wisps of cloud on a full dirty city moon. He could feel the touch of her breath. Beneath the perfume it had a uniquely sweet, carnivorous smell. Debra.

”Yes, do it for her,” Akisha whispered and kissed him on the corner of the mouth, the lightest touch, as much a brand of benediction as pa.s.sion. ”Our love for our kin is what binds our spirits to them. They are never very far off. But you knew that already. You always knew that. Avenge her, for vengeance and honor is the only path of the true warrior, my whelp.”

It was near daybreak when the second slayer stepped into the club. He wasn't like the other, darker, one.