Part 17 (1/2)

”Debra?”

The brunette sucked down her nub of a cigarette and eyed him warily as her sisters looked on. ”Hi,” she said, and up close she smelled vaguely musky like old perfume and gin. He looked down and saw that a small gold cross graced the hollow of her throat, not a ring.

”I can be Debra,” she told him.

”You a cop?” said one of the prost.i.tute's blonde sisters.

He continued to stare at her throat. ”No. Do I look like one?”

”He's a cop, Chrissy,” said the other sister.

”I'm not a cop,” Alek insisted.

”Leave me alone!” said the girl, suddenly, backing away like a frightened animal, her green eyes large and shy.

Alek tightened his hand on her arm to arrest her escape.

”He's a f.u.c.king narc,” said the first sister.

”Chrissy!” said the second sister. ”Come on!”

Chrissy began to weep and pulled herself free of his hold. And as her disguise of cosmetic paint poured down her face to reveal the innocent beauty of her thirteen-year-old features, Alek felt his heart shrivel and die. He let her go. He pushed his way past the girls and out onto the walk that would take him like a magic carpet back to the skeletal tenement. Back to Teresa.

She had lit candles throughout the attic.

”You mustn't be so self-conscious of your brilliance.”

He crept like a villain into her room.

In the dimness of the musty, claustrophobic s.p.a.ce her delicate face and hands shone like virgin lace where she stood staring up at something on the wall. ”You are an artist of terrible strength.” She refused to abandon the shadows for the moment. ”You make her truly immortal,” she said.

Alek stopped, dizzy with disorientation. And then, emboldened by that same feeling of weightless displacement, he walked across the creaking floorboards to a portrait dominating the center wall over a long- dead fireplace. He wondered why he had not noticed it until now and could conclude only that it must have been covered by a sheet. That or it was Teresa's glamour at work on him again, letting him see, but only with the blinders she created.

The portrait was of a woman of supernatural beauty, raven-haired, with predatory brown eyes so beautiful a critic might have thought the artists had exaggerated their brilliance. Her features were delicate, her skin alabaster, and yet there was an unmistakable look of power in her face. Perhaps it was her mouth, the wide lips painted red, smirking but not smirking. It would have given her an expression of bitter derision had she not been so beautiful.

It was, of course, his own face at certain times. It was Debra. And he wondered how in h.e.l.l Teresa had gotten ahold of the portrait. He'd sold it years ago on the sidewalk outside his loft. Sold it for a loaf of whitebread and a bottle of vodka. He remembered.

Teresa turned away from the portrait to look at him. Her eyes held the flames of the many candles like cages of red birds. And he thought rather absently, angel of fire.

”Angel of vengeance,” she answered him.

”Whose?”

”Yours.”

”I mean whose angel.”

”I know.” Red ghosts played over her face, gave her the semblance of life, like marble dutifully painted to seem like real flesh to the artist. Like he had meant Debra's portrait to do. She'd fed fairly recently, and now for reasons he feared to guess at, he felt no real revulsion. No fear.

”How did you get that picture?” he asked.

She looked at it. She halved her eyes like a cat. ”I knew the owner. She gave it to me. I couldn't believe you would sell it.”

”You were watching me? Even then?”

She didn't answer him, and he felt suddenly confused by her words, as if he were a child being made to play a game the rules of which had never been explained to him. So instead of understanding them, or wanting to, he moved closer to her and said, to change the subject, ”Can you read the map?”

She glanced askance at the bed where it lay, narrowed her eyes further. She said, ”Things change, they changeth not.” She went to the map and touched a small odd legend high up in a corner. ”We begin here tonight. I know this place--”

”Don't.”

She was silent; and then she said, ”'Your eyes will be mine.'”

”I'm his f.u.c.king spy,” he said miserably. ”Whether I want to be or not.”

”There's something unnatural about him. Something wrong.”

”Debra said that.”

And Debra had been more than right. Alek looked away into the heat of the flames of the candles on the mantel and felt them turn his face to wax. How had he not seen what she'd seen? Was he so blind? He could glimpse the life of anyone in this city, could even touch it briefly if he so chose to, and yet he had not been able to see the darkness sunk into the eyes of the one who had known him best. How was it possible to see so far and yet remain so sightless?

Teresa stepped forward out of the dark. The medieval gown was gone; it had been replaced by the lethal clothing of the day, a black little sliplike dress and fishnet stockings and a pair of battered Doc Martens. He looked at her cold little streetwalker's garb, the way the material, as worn as it was, slithered like silk over her hips and b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Candlelight played like gold across the s.h.i.+ning twin rings in her lower lip. He reached and found her black leather jacket on the bed beside the map and held it in front of him like a s.h.i.+eld as she approached him.

”You must be cold,” he said, offering her the coat.

She shook her head, her hair falling loose and tangled like black lace across her naked white throat. She smiled ever so slightly with her smoky eyes and mouth.

He got a solid grip on the jacket.

Teresa only closed the s.p.a.ce between them, saying nothing, everything. Primitive images invaded his thoughts. Making love to her, right then and there, and then going down into the city of humans cowering in the dark to run and hunt among them like a wolf in a field of naive sheep. But it was only her glamour. Her thoughts. It was.

She grew close enough for him to smell the kill on her breath. Her lips parted daintily; her teeth gleamed white. And then she turned and gave him her back, spread her delicate arms. ”Please.”

Feeling ridiculous and defeated, he slid the jacket upon her like a queen's royal mantle. She took his hands, folded them around her middle, edged her head back until her rustling-thick hair brushed his bottom lip. He let his hands linger at her waist for only the shortest of moments, just until she let him go, and then he stepped back, away. She turned back around with her gifts of death and love and seduction and took his hand. She turned it over as if she would read his fate once more and kissed it, put it to her heart. ”Don't leave me, Alek Knight. Never leave me.”

He watched the flames caress her face and throat. There was red now everywhere in her divine image. Red in her mouth and eyes. Red reflected on her silky black jacket. Red in her touch.

She was luring him out into the center of her web, weaving the spell of her existence over him the way she had for countless others over countless centuries. He saw the years in her thoughts, the cities, Venice and Rome and Naples, the names and the faces of her kills, too many to count, heard the innocent words of her seduction. She was a woman after all, and an animal, and woman and animal, she lured the unwary to her with the sweet perfume of the pitcher plant on her skin and the venom in her deadly kiss. And there, in countless backstreets and convent cells with the moon a knife in her eyes, she had taken their dark Roman faces to her white breast, given her slender frame over to their ungentle hands, let them kiss the purity from off her cheeks. And she had willingly drunk their smoky, beery, decayed breaths on those nights, because it was what pleased them and what they most wanted from their victim and what their exotic pleasures most demanded; but always it ended the same way, not with the ecstasy of life but the exquisite agony of death and early d.a.m.nation. It was her power and her gift and she gave it willingly and asked for nothing but their life in return. The creed of the predator. Survival at all cost. But though she offered herself as the venomous fruit of Eden itself there was none that saw her soul, none who glimpsed her age and sorrows and her many painful wisdoms...

No, wait. No one but Paris, once-- ”And you. You see me as I truly am,” she said and leaned close so she was touching, caressing all his body with her own, the feeling so acute it was like the skipping of a pulsepoint in the dark. She rubbed herself against him, and the raw sensuality of it grew, w armin g, seething, seeming to gain a living presence all about them. And then her mouth was there like wet velvet, like an orchid, and she was kissing him with all her vengeance, and her lips seemed so frail on his, but gathering suddenly in strength, and after a moment's hesitation he kissed her back, almost desperate, the sweetness of the deadly pitcher plant and the bitterness of her venom seizing up the priest inside him. For a moment she changed, and he wasn't at all surprised that she should taste of roses and fire and the things that were red, but it was only her charms at work on him, and when he tensed at the taste and tried to draw away she changed again, and again he tasted her venom and her years and the wicked edge of hungry, unspent desire.

She kissed his mouth, her hands branding his back with fire, sliding like steel beneath his coat. He whispered to her and closed his eyes and held and wors.h.i.+pped her. He wanted her now with an urgency that frightened and appalled him. She had cracked the barrier of his hypocrisy. She had let in all the floodwaters of his pain and all his sweat-soaked midnight dreams. He kissed her mouth, biting her gently, urging her on, offering himself as a villain and a victim, whichever she most desired, everything if she desired it, his soul if she demanded it.

Her teeth touched the hypersensitive skin under his chin and stopped. ”No.”

”Please.”