Part 15 (1/2)

The blood was astonis.h.i.+ng. It painted the walls of their white room like a picture of abstract poinsettias. It painted Alek and it painted his twin in its cloying, metallic sweetness. It did not seem possible a single person could have so much blood in them. Debra laughed playfully and put her tongue to the gush of warmth like Alek had seen other children put their tongues to water fountains in the park. Debra drank in greedy, starving gulps, and when she looked up at him, her face was red out of which glowed only the feral blackness of her eyes, eyes shot through with sad, heckling laughter and the madness of her life.

Debra licked her lips clean and Alek felt his paralysis break. He felt himself sink inside at the sight, almost blacken out. And knowing now, knowing why they'd been left on the doorstep of the Home eight years ago by a nameless, faceless individual who had obviously seen the shadows behind their eyes, but who had not had the heart for proper murder. Knowing now, knowing the name given to her, to them, to their race, and knowing it was not demiG.o.d, was not G.o.d of any kind at all. Knowing everything now with the shock of instinct, knowing and sick now with the completion of that knowledge. And it wasn't like in the stories and the movies, not at all. There was no beauty in death, no glory. It was all red and torn and b.l.o.o.d.y and foul.

Debra smiled invitingly at him, red lips drawing away from hard ivory teeth, a pulpy shred of the b.i.t.c.h's flesh caught in the corner of her mouth, the mouth he always kissed. And he saw, nearly like an afterthought, that the ring had swung free around her neck and that she had his Andy doll clutched tight by one arm, and these human affectations only seemed to make the horror of her utterly real to him. So when she kissed him with her murderous mouth, then tried to draw his face down to the new chalice she offered, he balked and thrashed away from her, from the horror that was her, from the searing, murderous taste of a dead woman on her lips. He got to his feet and raced to the other side of the room and crouched in the moonlight.

And yet still she came at him, eyes curious as a cat's, words seeking him, touch questing. And at last, with his back against the wall, with nowhere else to go, he snapped and made a pained sound of horror in his throat and struck her across the face. Debra went down. It was not a harsh blow, but it had harmed her in a way no blow could because it came from him.

”Aaalek,” she whined plaintively, touching her face where a spayed red mark, almost as red as blood, was taking hold.

He glanced sideways at the remains of the b.i.t.c.h, hating her all the more for doing this to Debra. To them both. He shuddered uncontrollably like someone with a fatal fever, trying to forget all those lessons in Sunday School, all those meandering scriptures with their hidden and d.a.m.ning meanings, but unable to, for the wages of sin were death, right? And death--murder--was the worse sin in the world anyone could ever do. He found one of their yellowing backissues of Weird Tales lying on the floor beside their bed and picked it up. Then he rounded on her, breathing hard but inspired. ”Is this what you want, Debra?” he ranted at her, he supposed like a madman. ”To be this? Is that what you want? Do you want to be d.a.m.ned?”

”Beloved...” She rose unsteadily and looked at him with her subhuman eyes. Her voice was old, confused suddenly, the voice of some G.o.ddess exhumed from her grave of a thousand years. She looked at the mess of their room that she had made as if she could not understand his rage. ”She--it's the blood of our enemy!”

”You murdered her, Debra!”

”She doesn't count.”

She was closing the black box down on him, sealing the canvas over his face like a burial shroud, because she believed his will was her own and her word the truth, but if she was going to willingly embrace d.a.m.nation and be a monster like in the movies then she would be doing it alone, without him.

He began to weep, but dryly. ”You do what you want, but don't you dare ask me to go into this thing with you! Don't you dare!” He threw the magazine at her with its ghoulish, cruel-eyed cover. ”I won't do it! I don't care who you are, I won't! I hate you! I hate you to h.e.l.l!”

Like a somnambulist her arms went out to him. A child waking from a nightmare or only waking to a new one. She looked at him without understanding. She seemed to fall at his words.

But then he caught her, pulling her out of the nightmare, to him, to the shelter of his body. She sobbed, shuddering, her mouth wet and miserable against his skin; she stained his clothes dark with her tears.

”You said you'd l ove me forever,” she said.

His anger and horror were gone. His Debra was crying and tearing his heart to pieces. He made soothing noises to calm her, stroked her hair, rocking her gently in his embrace as her mind sought the cloister of his own. He sobbed with her, loving her and despising her, repulsed and enchanted by her, feeling so close to her now and yet so very hopelessly far away.

And after many moments it all seemed to end, not the horror of what she--they--had done, but the shock of it. He suddenly found himself capable of thought and words. ”We have to go away now,” he decided. ”Far away before they find out.” And she nodded at his words and let him gather her up, cradling her thin, tired little body easily in his arms.

He took her to the bed and dressed her in warm clean clothes and wiped the blood off her face, and then he changed himself and gathered together a few simple but important things. Their pictures. His Andy doll. Once finished, they padded silent and shoeless from the room that had once caged them, been their home. They went down the vacant corridor, down the flight of backstairs that connected the dorms with the butler's pantry at the rear of the Home, and there they put on their boots and coats and prepared to go out into the wintry darkness of the city.

They met no one on the way, and just as well: Alek was certain he would have commanded anyone to stay back as they left the Home by the door through which they had entered it. And he was equally certain anyone he commanded to do so would have obeyed him without question.

”Coelum non animum mutant, qui trans mare current.”

The coa.r.s.e white voice came to him out of the darkness and the dull, weary winter dawn, and Alek's breath caught at the sound as if on a thorn. He untangled himself from his twin and looked around searchingly.

Behind them the white wooden horse gently moved on its revolver, clicking forward three paces, then falling back as the wind and snow buffeted it. And Debra, clasped to him where they huddled under the canopy, hoping to wait out the storm, comforted at last to sleep by his words and this place, moaned lightly.

”Horace,” said the voice. ”Epistles. A favorite of mine.”

Holding her tightly, Alek narrowed his eyes and was at last able to pick out the figure standing on the gravel path not a dozen feet from them. The invader had gotten there, but how? He'd thought they were alone here, and he was certain, with his newfound senses, that he would detect even a drunkard's feeble staggering. And yet a strange man stood here now with a hand resting on the ebony war-horse, his robes so black it--and most of the rest of him--disappeared into the night and made his white face and hands swim ghostlike and disembodied in the dark.

No, he was mistaken, he saw: it was not robes that the man wore but a long black habit and black topcoat, like something a priest might wear.

Alek cradled his sister's head protectively to his heart. ”Are you a priest, sir?”

It was all he could think to say. There were priests at the Home who held Ma.s.s and regular Sunday School cla.s.ses every week. He knew what a priest looked like and what a priest was and what a priest did. You told a priest your evils. And priests hated vampires, he knew that too.

The man who looked like a priest smiled with scarcely any change of expression. ”In fact, der Kleine, a priest I am. But you mustn't fear. Vampire? You are much more, child. And much less.”

Alek didn't know what to say to that or what the priest even meant. ”Those words you spoke,” he said, ”are they Latin?”

One eyebrow arched and the priest's smile grew. ”Bright boy.”

”What do they mean, sir?”

The priest stepped forward, and as he pa.s.sed beyond the shadows the last of the midwinter's moon took and became his hair. It was a mane that fell to his waist, and it was as white as a hundred alien suns, as white as a twilight blizzard. He was too impossible to be real, too ephemeral to exist for very long, and yet he did.

Some huge power existed within him that he seemed scarcely able to contain, a power so large it dwelled about him almost like a retinue.

”They mean,” he said as he swayed forward and Alek saw at last the vanis.h.i.+ng pale of this man's eyes, ”that you have come home, Alek Knight.” The priest touched his face and it was like the cool holy burning of ash.

Alek s.h.i.+vered. ”How...do you know who I am?”

The priest laughed. ”Ah, but now, little knight, I can't be telling you all. A magician never reveals his secrets, does he?”

Debra stirred in his arms. ”Alek,” she moaned, ”what's happening?”

”It's all right.” He kissed her hair. ”He's a friend.” He looked up at the priest. ”He's...he's like us, I think.”

Debra sat up and sought out the stranger's eyes. And almost at once Alek felt the icy rime of her distrust and heard her stony voice in his mind which said there was no room in their world but for him and her. She turned her face into him. I want to go away, Alek. Take us far away.

We have nowhere to go, Debra.

Come with me, children, said the priest in their private language, and go with your own kind. And go into the open, waiting arms of the Coven.

Alek narrowed his eyes. ”The Coven?”

The priest shrugged. ”Is everything. Sanctification. Redemption. Everything.”

Redemption. Alek knew what that word meant: forgiveness, for Debra and for himself, for allowing them to slip so far into the dark.

The man uncurled one of his hands like a gift. ”It must be your decision.”

The man was a priest. A Father.

”And you could be my son,” he said, ”if you so wish it.”

Alek watched as his hand came off Debra's face and was slowly devoured by whiteness. He felt a chill in his blood at the contact that burned him as deep as a vow.

And then the priest pulled them easily from the stage and down into the darkness of his coat. And as a new fierceness of midwinter's snow began to fall he raised the loose, swirling folds of that coat and covered their heads against it as though it was a dark wing under which he had taken them.

Amadeus, Priest-warrior.

Amadeus, Covenmaster.

Magician.