Part 20 (2/2)
The Father parried an underhand strike. Sean met the sword the best he could. Steel shrieked against steel and slid away. The rebound of the lunge nearly put Sean on his a.s.s. Luckily, He hit the back of the Coventable and caught his balance and leaned over to catch his breath. ”Do you...do you know where those two lollipops are, huh?”
”Not yet. But soon. Denn die toten reiten schnell.”
The slayers hovering at a distance s.h.i.+fted like shadows and chirped to each other like the surviving bats in the Abbey.
”Denn die-what?” Sean said, eyeing their glowing white distant eyes.
Amadeus smiled and struck savagely once more. ”'For the dead travel fast.'”
Asleep she seemed younger, more vulnerable, and he had to keep reminding himself that it was only her spell. Sitting on the mattress beside her with his back propped against the wall, Alek skated the chunk of coal over the blank side of an old flier in staccato bursts of black. It was good, the purest thing he'd drawn in years. But perhaps that too was her spell; certainly, her face had had the power last evening to stop curious commuters all the way to topground.
”'The Devil hath power/To a.s.sume a pleasing shape,'” she said suddenly, coming alive at his side and turning over so the shadows were off her face.
”Dante?”
”The Bard. I detest the goths.” Her black, unnatural eyes were open now, and sitting up now she was once more a great, perfect doll, sinister and animated.
”Dante believed that all the world's devils go back in their box in the ground during the day,” she uttered, stretching like a cat, skin taut over strong muscle and deceptively delicate bones. Unlike him, she slept naked, unashamed--if, indeed, shame had ever been a element of her spirit, even as a young woman. He seriously doubted it. Her flesh was pierced in some places, scarified in others, the scars an art in themselves that drew his eye again and again. Yet nothing about her repulsed him anymore, nothing at all. Quite the contrary...
She looked on him as if reading his thoughts. Her skin, her hair--white satin, black silk. But unlike her clientele, he had touched her not at all while they slept at either ends of this common bed. It wasn't that he didn't feel the itch. Even now he did. Particularly now as she all but offered herself up to him like a living sacrifice. But she was right, after all. To love her, to be beloved of her--how could he keep the ghost in the picture on the wall over their heads from intruding? ”I only wish you could be with me there, even then, in the dark of day.”
”I'm with you now.”
”No,” she said, ”not even now. He reaches down from above and she stands below with wings outstretched and Alek Knight hangs between two devils, the white one and the black.”
He looked away from her, lest she see his despair and his rage. The white devil. The devil with the white eyes. But they were so dark, so tainted with his six hundred years of blood, his wrath of holy fire and the twisted lies of his life. Alek's fist clenched compulsively and the carbon turned to silt that trickled darkly between his white fingers and fell across the white sheets like soot.
”I'll kill the b.a.s.t.a.r.d,” be whispered. ”This is all I'll endure. This is it.”
”Vengeance.”
”f.u.c.king war. He killed Akisha and he killed Debra. I've carried this so long. But not anymore.” He opened his hand and the wind whispering through the boarded-over windows took the black powder and scattered it.
He grimaced, tasted copper like a Eucharist of metal on his tongue. The taking of the Host before battle.
”I'm going to make the prophecy real. I'm going to serve up the motherf.u.c.ker's head to the church and whatever G.o.d he serves.”
Teresa narrowed her vixen-eyes on him like a high pagan priestess bestowing a benediction upon a favorite warrior. ”You would spit in the face of Lucifer.” She smiled. ”At last.”
Alek studied his sketch, the lines drawn so perfectly to scale, the graceful curve of her cheek, her breast, her black, beautiful insectoid eyes. He crumpled it and tossed it away. Beautiful but insubstantial like all the work of his life.
He could see. Finally.
Awakened, as Akisha called it.
He stood up and found his coat and put it on like the battle armor it felt so much like to him. He adjusted the leads in his coat to accommodate the weight of Takara's sword. Lastly, he found the map and glanced at the spot circled in red ink. Tonight's destination.
There was no pain now in his knee. There was no pain anywhere in his body but in his heart. He set the map aside and turned to study the picture hanging like an angel over the bed. And as Teresa slid out of bed and dressed for the evening, he felt his smile mimicked that of Debra's. Devious. Predatory. Secretive. The look of the ancient and the wronged and the powerful. He felt taller and as dark and manifest as an open abyss.
And somehow he knew as soon as he took those first certain steps outside that those who stood in his way would move aside immediately for reasons completely unbeknownst to them.
Together they descended the stairs to the city.
The hunt was again on.
Less than an hour later Alek's back was pressed to the deep alley's flank of the Empress as if he would read the song of her walls. And of all the off-off-Broadway opera houses, he thought, surely she had the darkest of melodies; celebrity and scandal, she was a place of innocent entertainment and calculated political attack.
He had read somewhere that she'd fed the tabloid well at the turn of the century, back when social angst was as fas.h.i.+onable as padded corsets or Derby hats. She'd petered off after that, gaining a little recognition as something of a sordid vaudeville stage frequented by soldiers on leave during the Second World War. She'd been little better than a boulevard rattrap in the beginning, but she'd transfigured with each transferring of hands. Theatre to museum house to antique emporium to government record house to temporary Department of War Defense outpost. On and on...until she'd come full circle in her cycle.
Of course she wasn't quite the same. Gone were the hosts of preening, posturing members of society lining her stairwell of crumbling cantilevered stone, the women in fur and jacquard, the cowed husbands in spats who carried canes with beast's heads of real silver, all of them there to see and be seen. Now only the poor and the bored and a handful of aspiring Thespians attended her nightly amateur productions, attracted to her history, perhaps, or only the sinister smile of her cornices.
The scarred orange brick was cold against his shoulders, stubbornly thick and secretive. Still, if the Chronicle was anywhere it must be here. It had to be here. He looked around tentatively, tried with the whole of his power of sight to feel this derelict Eastside block full of Pakistani grocers and Asian nightclubs and abandoned railyards. A few doors down, in the doorway of a deli, a black man in a tattered green field jacket scalped a roast chicken with enough c.o.ke stuffed inside of it to keep the Forty-second District busy for the next three years. Further on a lonely woman in a coldwater flat cried herself to sleep. Alek tried to reach beyond these human tragedies, looking for the supernatural cancer in the body of the city that would indicate a slayer or two.
So far nothing.
He felt relieved.
The b.u.m sleeping behind the meager protection of a Dumpster at the back of the alley turned over and muttered something whiskey-soaked and incomprehensible. Alek ignored the man and tipped his head back against the wall. The stars flitted like stop-signals in and out of sight through the choking blanket of nighttime smog overhead. ”Nothing,” he whispered. ”I think we have enough time if we don't dawdle. Maybe.”
Teresa said nothing, only gazed up at the abused cornices with their wicked Corinthian relief as if she were wondering about its secrets the same as he. She breathed in deeply, taking the air and all the data it carried in through her sensitive Jacobson's organ, seeing the unseeable the same as he, but with a process more natural than he was used to. Finally she said, ”You dread this game, caro, yes?”
”I'd like to dig Byron up and kill him again. Yeah,” he muttered. ”I'd also like to get my a.s.s down to Port Authority and get a one-way ticket on the longest line out.” He rubbed his arms nervously and started out after her retreating figure. ”But I guess we need that G.o.dd.a.m.n book first.”
He got no answer from her and expected none.
They followed the antique iron guardrail to the back stoop stage entrance. And there they encountered a punk heavy dressed in a tuxedo that looked scarcely able to hold in the force of the man's raw gym muscle.
Tux reached out and thumped the plain of his palm over Alek's chest, halting him. His piggy eyes shrank still more in his r uddy, bald face. His bicycle mohawk stood up proud and blue like the quills of a particularly threatening and unusual porcupine. He eyed Alek with contempt. ”No way. No one goes back there without a pa.s.s. 'Specially not bag people like you, you read, homeless? Soup kitchen's down da avenue.”
Alek looked down at the hand holding him back. A colorful viper tattoo meandered along its meaty back, lending a dazzling three-dimensional illusion of the snake creeping out of Tux's sleeve. He thought absently of Erebus, another hulk of a creature, and the damage he usually had to deal the man to get past. Should he fear this then, he wondered, this colorful character with his big words and bad judgment? His hand came up, ready to s.n.a.t.c.h and break the man's arm, to tear his hand off at the wrist if he had to. Because he could.
Because, really, this was the only way to deal with these types.
But in the end he stopped and dropped his hand, remembering Teresa's glamour, the spell so easily woven by her. The power that protected them from Amadeus's all-seeing eyes in her nest, the power that had beaten back even Takara's illusions enough for Teresa to plant her knife in the slayer's belly. Alek turned his eyes up into the punk's face. ”Please,” he said, gaining an impression of the man's ill-defined anger being artistically channeled into this bizarre job. ”We need to go inside.”
”Wa.s.samatta, you stupid? Scram. Don't make me angry...”
Alek narrowed his eyes. Anger. Anger was innocent death, the broken chain before its time, anger was a thousand voices calling for the blood of Aragon, a monster, a man made G.o.d by the church and unchained among the weaker ma.s.ses like a wolf among sheep. Anger was the covenant sealed between creature and creator when all the vows were nullified. Anger was a strike to the face, not wounding but as sharp as a drawn sword...
Tux fell back, untounched, against the back stage door and slumped down, leaving the way completely open for them. Alek stepped over the man and into the wings. The expression on his face might have been religious agony, but Alek did not look close enough to know for certain.
20.
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