Part 23 (1/2)

He was pacing without knowing it. It was so cliched he hated it. Pacing. So hot in here, he thought as he unb.u.t.toned his coat. Over on the nightstand sat an old ragdoll with a ratty worn face. He went over to it and picked it up.

It combusted almost at once into a ma.s.s of tattered cloth, stuffing and roaring red yarn. Cursing, Booker threw it down into the wastepaper basket beside the bed. The flames sprung up, blue in their heat, then died down. The doll burned fitfully for a second or two, then dissolving into white smoke and debris.

He closed his eyes as he fought to put the endless gout of psi back in the fireproofed box of his mind, like the Father had taught him. He hissed through his teeth, concentrating. A thread of sweat tricked down his brow.

Boooker...

He shook his head. He opened his eyes.

Oh Boook...

He looked sideways at the miniature pyre burning at the bottom of the basket. This was ridiculous. What, was he hearing voices in his head like some kind of f.u.c.king psychopath now? He shook his head, but an image came to him with all the shock of memory. He was no more than fourteen, showering, the water a roaring curtain between himself and the rest of the world. Yet the figure penetrated it. At first he thought it was Alek; then a pair of delicate female hands broke through the curtain and touched her white fingertips to his naked ebony chest. He saw her face, eyes flas.h.i.+ng black beneath winged brows, a wicked, inviting smile...

Debra...

With a roar, Book threw the basket against the bookshelves, the flotsam of burned stuff filling the room with an acrid, h.e.l.lish stench.

G.o.d help him, he had a sword. And he had another weapon locked none-too-safely inside his mind. And he had no compacture about using either one, so help him. If Alek and dead Debra wanted to play Crispy Critter with him then that was just fine, that was just...f.u.c.king...fine!

The stench of crisping fabric and scorched bone gathered in his nostrils and mouth and throat...

He nearly gagged with it all, with purpose.

He turned from the window and rushed from his brother's cell with scarcely a thought, but an entire mission simmering inside of him, taking form. Yes. He knew what to do.

Downstairs in the parlor he practically fell across Robot and Totty where they were sitting in front of the parlor computer. Home from the hunt and unscathed only because Alek hadn't actually gotten ahold of them, and here they were, plotting their next move already. Maybe they would have had a totally different perspective if they'd seen what was left of Kansas spread all over the rails of three different terminals. He doubted it though. Some folks just never got enough.

He stopped and glanced around the parlor, but their suicide king was missing, apparently. ”Where's the wonderbrat?” he asked nonchalantly.

Aristotle glanced up, hooked his thumb around backwards toward the library.

”No s.h.i.+t?” Book b.u.t.toned up his coat to the chin. ”What's he doing in there? He got a pit barbecue going with the Father's favorite texts, or what?”

Aristotle took a drag on his cigarette like he was insulted or something. He smiled to conceal a cough. A one- time geekazoid health-nut, he'd only taken up smoking last year when he joined the Coven and discovered smoking couldn't put him in a casket. ”He's reading. Researching his psi.” He sniffed the air, a bit overdramatically, but it wasn't his own smoke he was smelling. ”You know?” he said with those bushy upraised Grocho-brows Alek always joked about, ”Something some of us need to do?”

Book held up his hands. ”Hey, man, no damage done.” He plucked a cig out of his own coat pocket and lit up, thankful that the Father had never had fire detectors installed in the Covenhouse. Between Totty and himself and his psi--Jesus, but they'd be busy.

”Naw, you're way off,” Book heard Aristotle say, and he almost thought the geek was speaking to him, but it was mute Robot he was addressing. Robot signed back angrily with fingers as thick around as bratwursts and yet so nimble it was a near-miraculous display of talent. He pointed to something on the McNally computer- map. Tapped it. Me right, you wrong.

Booker headed for the foyer, but Aristotle surprised him. ”Hey...Book?”

Booker turned around. A shock of heat floated up through his body and came out his nostrils. It could have been Frenched cig smoke but it smelled like a human rotisserie. No one called him Book, except his very closest friends. Alek. A few others. A very few others. ”What?”

Aristotle looked taken aback, then recovered and motioned him closer. You don't reeeeally want me closer, whitebread, do you? Guess so. Book obliged him with a look of pure menace. ”Settle something for us,”

Aristotle said, showing him the monitor. ”I say the rogue shows up at the Metropolitan next, Robey says Rockefeller Center. What do you think?”

Book looked at them both. ”How'd you come up with these two locals, Sherlocks?”

Aristotle fixed his gla.s.ses. ”Well, that Byron fellow, he hid the Chronicle, right? And he was that Debra's thing, right?”

”He was never 'Debra's',” Book said.

”But the Father said--”

”The Father is wrong. Debra was Alek's. Only Alek's.”

”Jesus.” Aristotle frowned, then recomposed himself. ”Anyway, Byron wors.h.i.+pped her, right?”

Book nodded. We all did. Especially Alek. And now you're paying the price of that wors.h.i.+p, aren't you, brother? Alek, where the h.e.l.l are you?

”And her favorite spots were the Metro and the Rockefeller Center skating rink. So natch, that's the most likely places, right? Except that the Metro is really more likely”--he glanced up self-righteously at silent, glowering Robot filling up his seat--”because Alek can't skate.”

Booker shook himself, tried to digest this bizarre logic. But what did you expect from this little whitebread wusshead who'd probably go into apoplectic shock if you took his computer away for a day? ”Because he can't skate?” he parroted incredulously.

Aristotle blanched. ”Well...he can't.”

”How,” Book asked, ”do you know Alek can't skate? You best buds or somethin'? You hang with him, white boy?”

”No! It's just...I never saw him.”

Booker laughed nastily and leaned in close to the whelp. ”Alek could watch you screw the brains out of your girlfriend if he chose to, Totty, and you wouldn't know jack s.h.i.+t about it. He could kick your a.s.s so hard you'd cough up your own heart. And here's the rub--” he leaned in even closer, until the whelp could feel his heat and sweat it--”he can slay slayers. You think a little thing like skating is beyond him? Hmm?”

Aristotle swallowed, said nothing. Booker reached out and petted him on the head like a dog, then took a handful of his scrawny, three-inch ponytail. Tight. Tighter. Until he saw tears gleam in Aristotle's eyes behind his c.o.ke-bottle-bottom gla.s.ses. Book showed the whelp his teeth. ”Leave Alek the f.u.c.k alone.” He glanced up at Robot sitting so piously. Like himself and Alek, Robot was an elder, and deserving of more respect than this. But right now, G.o.dd.a.m.nit, Book felt a thousand years anyone's elder. He said, ”I will tell you this once and only once. Next time you find out on your own: When you fight Alek you fight the Father.”

Then he left the parlor behind with the two of them dumbstruck and staring after him. And made a point of slamming the door of the Covenhouse behind him. Hard.

It was another typical Braxton show. Awash in the Bette Davises and penguin men he moved, sipping nothing in pa.s.sing, nodding at none of the empty comments and praises, the de facto center of attraction, if for no other reason than because he looked like none of them. He looked like what he was, instead. A tramp.

A rogue. A rumpled, longhaired, underslept slayer. He looked like h.e.l.l itself, and the crones who haunted these parties to see and be seen turned away as he approached, their diamonds still burning his eyes. He had thought of waiting until after the show, but, Jesus, they didn't have that much time left. Not anymore. Not with Amadeus so close. With the Stone Man practically on their heels these days. Braxton would have to find time for them, even if this was a show he'd scheduled for over two years or more.

Hot in here. As usual. Alek undid his coat and stopped a waiter tricked out in a black tux like some cheap Hammer film-style vampire, said, ”Do you know where Charles is?”

”Charles, sir?” came the hesitant, heavy-lidded, Jeevesque reply. The boy looked positively puzzled.

Alek shook him. ”Charles Braxton. The man who employs you?”

More querulous frowns from the boy. Alek decided not to push his luck anymore. He let the boy go. If he intimidated the waiter, the kid was liable to call security, and then there would be serious trouble to contend with. Too late, old man. Already he saw a couple of plainclothesmen swimming toward him through the crowd like a pair of idle hammerheads. Holding up his hand in a sign of surrender, he backed out of the room.

Apparently deciding he was more than a minor threat to aesthetics, they followed him out to the alley. They looked a little unreal, these two. Sort of like Abbot and Costello doing the Keystone Kops thing. Abbot's magnum was real enough, though. He stepped through the back door and put it in Alek's face while Costello with his paunch and self-satisfied looks unclipped the police ban radio disguised as a cell phone hanging on his belt.

”You don't want to do that,” Alek said.

”I don't wanna kick your a.s.s between your teeth, boy,” Abbot answered in a northern redneck drawl that did little to support his Bud Abbot image, ”and I won't, jest long as you stay right there. Here?”

Alek grabbed the gun and turned it on the man, the man's hand still attached to it. The wristbones sounded as noisy as a kid smas.h.i.+ng down a bowl of corn flakes with a spoon. Abbot screamed hoa.r.s.ely. Costello pulled out his own little cannon. And maybe he wasn't a slo-mo hick, maybe he was a born-and-bred city boy the same as Alek, but that didn't make him quick. Nothing could, just right then. Alek mule kicked him in the groin, doubling him over and sending him into the side of a Dumpster with a hollow thump.

Costello groaned, scrabbling at the asphalt and his lost toy. Teresa stepped out of the shadows of the Dumpster and gripped him by the back of the coat, bashed the back of his skull against the side of the Dumpster again. Finally, Costello slumped down into dreamland.

Abbot continued to wail irritatingly. Alek wrenched him over so the man flipped onto his back on the pavement. He put his booted foot over the man's face and was just about to rub it out like old cabbage when the voice at the mouth of the alley caught his attention.