Part 14 (1/2)

This--it's all about the f.u.c.king church!”

Amadeus shook his head.

”It's about the plan. The Purge.”

Amadeus's eyes snapped to attention and Alek knew then, knew for sure, that he was right. Teresa was right.

Alek spoke the words he thought. ”You--Aragon--you betrayed Paris--all the other vampires--for the church.

You made a deal with them, didn't you? Didn't you?”

The Covenmaster's silence and indecision was acquiescence enough. Amadeus lowered the sword to his side.

He seemed to know the charade was over, all the masks gone. He closed his eyes and said, ”Alek, beloved, know that--that everything I did, I did for love.”

”Love? The word rots on your tongue!”

Amadeus ignored the outburst. ”Where is the Chronicle?”

”I don't know.”

”You know.”

”I don't know! No one does! Byron did, but you killed him.” He swallowed down a sob as the claustrophobic walls of too many memories pressed into him like a collapsing tomb. ”You killed him,” he said again. ”And Debra. Only they knew...”

The Father's simmering white eyes opened. ”Do not pursue this, my whelp. Please...”

”I have to!” Alek shouted, shuddered, caught a glance of the s.h.i.+r out of the corner of his eye. Maybe if he could just get ahold of it, maybe in the Father's present state of angst, maybe...maybe he would have half a chance in h.e.l.l at life. If he could get there, if he could keep the Father off-balance long enough. He said, ”Teresa, Paris--they believed the church was going to destroy us, all of us. Like in the Inquisitions. Like that.

And any deal you cut isn't going to be worth s.h.i.+t when they get what they want.”

”Teresa lies. And you don't know the church--”

”The Chronicle is proof! Or why would you be here now? Who sent you? Your masters from the church?”

He put his hand upon the desk. He shook his head. ”It doesn't matter. Maybe the Chronicle can protect us-- maybe it'll change everyone's idea of what's going on. But when the church gets it again it's over for all of us, you blind b.a.s.t.a.r.d. You, me, anyone you're protecting.” Alek let out his breath, almost a sob. He was so close, close enough to smell the steel of the blade. ”We're all marked, all our race. And the humans will be the slayers then, they'll--”

Amadeus rushed forward, his eyes frenzied. He slapped Alek across the face, gripped him by the shoulders and pulled him forward. ”The church protects me and I protect you. I always have!”

Alek spat in his master's face. ”I don't want your protection!”

The mad, holy expression on the Covenmaster's face shattered like panes of gla.s.s. He slapped his disciple again and this time the momentum of the blow cast Alek against Akisha's desk with all the terrible force of a bird struck down from its perch by a cat's paw.

Alek shuddered from the blow, caught himself, steadied himself, gripped the edge of the desk for purchase. He shook himself. His face stung as if the flesh had been peeled from the bone. He tried to tell himself that the Father was misguided, a thrall of the church, a victim like them all, but he knew that wasn't true.

Amadeus was just lost. And this would not be the last time. Amadeus would hit him again and again.

Amadeus would hit him until his will was as broken as his body and he would do anything, say anything, the Father wanted. Anything the church wanted. Because a ward of Amadeus was forever...

Through a veil of tears, Alek saw the s.h.i.+rasaya lying on the ink blotter of Akisha's desk. He reached for it-- then yanked his hand back compulsively as Amadeus's blade hissed by a mere inch from Alek's hand, leaving a long gash in the blotter and an even deeper groove in the wood of the desk. Alek stood back, the desk between them, and tried to decide what to do before Amadeus-- ”Akisha?”

Both slayers turned toward the third voice at once. Akisha's girl was on her hands and knees on the floor beside her lover's body. She must have emerged from her dreamplace on Akisha's death and was staring down at the b.l.o.o.d.y remains of the mistress in wide-eyed, childish confusion. As if she could not understand how something so immortal could now be so dead. ”Akisha?” came the girl's tiny, plaintive voice again. And then her expression broke. ”Akeeeeshaaaa...”

It was all the distraction Alek needed. He grabbed up the s.h.i.+rasaya, liberating it from the scabbard and pointing the savage weapon at Amadeus like a quivering finger. ”I'm not going back. I won't go back with you!”

Amadeus stood a moment indecisively. And then he laughed. He spread his arms, and in his coat and suit of rude wool clothes he looked absurdly like Jonathan Edwards about to sermonize the American Separatists into h.e.l.l. ”Futile, this. How can you win against the enemy who lives inside your head, who knows your devices even as you do. Remember, beloved, it is my blood you have in your veins. That shall never go away. I will be a part of you forever.”

He drifted around the desk and toward his wayward acolyte like some horrible, earthbound spirit.

Alek made a sickened, strangling noise. ”Don't...”

Amadeus stopped and narrowed his eyes. ”You belong to me.”

”I don't. I belong to Debra.”

”Debra is dead.”

”Sometimes the dead come back.”

Amadeus swayed closer, put out a long white hand to caress his hair as though to challenge him to do this--to strike his master and teacher. Alek blinked, and for just a moment Amadeus's figure transfigured into something looming and monstrous and shadowy and disfigured, something not of this world, something that had never belonged to it, something unnatural and hideous to behold-- Alek shuddered, groaned at the contact, and thrust the s.h.i.+rasaya forward through the cage of his master's ribs and up into Amadeus gut with all his sudden strength of panic, up, up further, all the way in, burying the longsword in his master all the way up to the simple rosewood hilt-- And halted.

Amadeus's expression remained unblemished by either surpris e or ag ony. Alek saw no defeat there, nothing that could be hurt, could die. Only the prowling rage of something inhuman and unstoppable, petty and rejected. And in that single, still moment of absolute crux, Alek found himself thinking of, not Teresa nor even Debra or Akisha cooling on the floor not a dozen steps away, but of the Prince of swans falling on his ice and dying.

Why must the heroes always die?

”d.a.m.nable,” Amadeus said. ”d.a.m.nable whelp. I am finished with you. Go to your sister, Alek. Now.”

Amadeus grabbed the sword just behind the pommel and jerked it unhesitantly out of the gaping hole in his gut and drove the hilt into Alek's stomach. Alek barely felt it as he careened over Akisha's desk and hit the Plexiglas pane of the office window behind it. The gla.s.s shuddered, shrieked, struggled to maintain its reputation--only a second--then gave it up.

After that there was only the hands of the wind and the sickening vertigo of a four-hundred foot plunge to the city floor below. He felt the wind animate his coat like the tattered wings of a great bat, and that made him wish in some final moment of utter desperation that he really could change as the stories and movies professed, shrink into a different creature with membranous wings that could cup and hold the wind and make him fly. Really, truly fly. At last, at long last-- But then he gave up the fantasy and let the darkness have him and hide him and take him down into a place after which no one could follow him.

15.

The holiday season was always marvelous at McEnroy Home, with baskets of donated goodies, and shopping sprees and outings arranged by the affluent. At eight years of age, Alek enjoyed the time of the year immensely, the theatre and carnival, the colored lights and the tinkling laughter and the warmth the city briefly embraced.

Especially wonderful were the outings when they toured someplace magic and perfect; it was a chance to feel clever and take Debra by the hand and lead her down through the sacred halls of the museums he read so much about and see the Masters of Old Europe and the timeless G.o.ds with beast's heads in their upright, airtight gla.s.s coffins. A chance to hunt down and study marvelous quarry constructed of oils and bronze and marble and light.

”Sekhmet,” Debra said once in The Hall of G.o.ds and pointed up at the lion-headed G.o.ddess. ”Battlequeen.

She killed her enemies without mercy and drank their blood.” Debra lingered over the statue, but Alek moved on quickly, eyes averted, because the clever feline grin on Sekhmet's whiskered face was so like Debra's own.

They saw Daumier and Delacroix and Matisse's white-plumed ladies. And Alek stood spellbound before the splattering bloodlike oils of Jerome Bosch, fearing and admiring the images that spoke without moving, those secrets whispered without words.

Afterward, the cla.s.s was ushered to Rockefeller Center as if they were expected to mingle with the children who came with parents and would leave with them. The McEnroy children, uniform in their grey, state- issued greatcoats, skated between boys in letter jackets and girls in flared, candy-pinked tulle skirts, all of it mother-chosen affectations to carefully define character in their children. And the Home children all grey- coated and incongruous, Alek thought, all but Debra. Of course.

As Alek watched, his sister crept up to the benches where the doting parents sat watching the expensive clothing their children had discarded in the warm rush of their expended energy and stole a young teenaged boy's black leather jacket almost right out from under the nose of his father. She smiled and swirled across the ice toward him in her red holiday dress and black jacket as the other Home children looked on with horror and pointed at her. ”You can't do that,” Alek chided her as she linked her hand through his.