Part 23 (2/2)

”Don't do that to Lenny. He's slow, but loyal.”

Alek looked up.

The woman stood there like a stark black Elvira outline burning against the streetlights of Madison Avenue.

Alek tried to put the voice together with the outline and failed horribly. Presumably the woman had followed him here from the party, and that meant she knew him or had business with him. For a moment, from the angle of the outline, the easy, angled curves, he almost expected Akisha to step forward, fully reformed and beautifully alive. But then the figure s.h.i.+fted, coming a series of steps closer, and Alek finally recognized the woman.

Not Akisha. Not one of his own. Mrs. Tahlia Braxton chuckled a little in that gravelly Lauren Becall voice of hers like he had said something witty or wise and took a long drag from off her cigarette. She Frenched it as she came over to study her downed man. Charles's powerful wife was dressed in an outfit typical of her style, a white linen jumpsuit bare at the throat and arms, a torc of silver with a red tiger's eye at its center around her naked throat. No coat or stole. Alek thought she must be frozen to the pavement, but she showed nothing of discomfort as she prodded Abbot in the side with one white designer boot. The boots were platformed-heeled, then again, Mrs.

Braxton stood nearly as tall as Alek himself; the heels must make her feel like a giant.

He had only met the White Bird as they called her once or twice at these parties, but each time he had come away with the feeling that Braxton's better half was just that--smarter, suaver, a regular iron hand in a silk glove. Now was no different.

”Get up, Lenny, and take Morton down to Emergency.”

When Lenny did nothing and only continued to stare up at the two of them with lemur-eyed fear, Mrs.

Braxton tossed her cigarette aside and lifted her eagle-eyed attention on Alek. ”Get this sot to his feet?”

”Sure.” Alek got Abbot up, trying not to make it look like too easy a task. G.o.d knows what she'd already seen; he didn't need her asking him where all his Superman strength came from. Between himself and Teresa they managed to get the Keystone Kops to the curb and Mrs. Braxton's waiting limo.

Mrs. Braxton directed her driver to St. Mary's, then s.h.i.+vered and turned, opened the silver monogrammed cigarette case in her pocket and lit a filterless smoke. She rubbed at her arms, seeming to feel the cold at last.

”Look, Mrs. Braxton--”

”Tahlia.”

”Tahlia,” Alek said, ”This is a mess.”

Tahlia shrugged like it was no big deal.

”I'm just trying to find Charles. I--”

”Dead.”

Something jumped inside of Alek. ”Charles is dead?”

”For the last fifteen years. Haven't you noticed, dear?” With peaked eyebrows, Tahlia headed up the steps of the Metro, her heeled boots clopping on the stone stairs of the Beaux-Arts structure crouching above them like a lost temple out of some Greek mythology.

A temple. And his last hope. The last marked spot on Byron's f.u.c.king map...

Alek dogged her. Didn't know why. It just seemed that he'd met somebody forgiving enough to know the score around here. Maybe Tahlia knew even more that her cantankerous husband. Or maybe it was just desperation. Probably it was desperation. Alek thought about Teresa's words this evening as they left the rectory of the church with its bloodred candles and pale saints and haunted priest. One last hope, mio caro.

One last hope...

Tahlia turned to face him at the top. ”Yeah?” she asked with her brusque Long Island diffidence.

”I...don't know how to put this,” Alek said.

Tahlia's eyes narrowed. An older woman, but she had the most ageless face Alek had ever seen on a mortal.

He reminded himself that next to nothing happened in this town without Tahlia Braxton's approval. She was quite literally a one-woman mob, probably capable of committing murder itself and getting away with it. And here he was, begging her interest.

He said, after a long breath, ”I really don't know how to ask you this, but do you--can you--I--”

”We were lovers, Byron and I,” she said.

For a moment the world itself took a half-turn around him. He looked out at the rough beginnings of a savage midwinter's storm gathering in the form of chrome-colored clouds above, the missions and soup kitchens locked tight against the night on distant 79th Street, wondering when the world had gone another level of crazy around him. Finally, he looked again at Tahlia. He swallowed, felt the curious edges of fate or coincidence brush past his shoulder like a wing. ”Excuse me?”

Another cigarette. Suddenly he saw the worry and the past, some secret sorrow, take root in Tahlia's storm grey eyes. She said, ”This--it's about Byron, right?”

Alek s.h.i.+vered, but not from fear. ”How do you know that? Or dare I ask that question?'

”You dare,” she answered him levelly. ”But dare ask it in the warmth of Charles's office, won't you? I'm freezing my a.s.s off here.”

He nodded. But just as he did so, just as he was about to follow Tahlia inside to discover her secrets, another s.h.i.+ver. And then a dark, bone-slender figure moved out from behind one of the Corinthian columns at the other end of the museum. It had begun to snow. The figure stood maybe a hundred feet away, but even were the storm a living holocaust of white, he would have been able to identify it alone by its feral, saintlike posture. With a tip of his head the man started down the wide Roman steps.

Alek said, to Tahlia, ”Will you give me a moment?”

Without a word or change of expression, Tahlia walked away, toward the wide double doors of the Metro. A bellboy ushered her inside. No answer. But her posture, the turn of her shoulders, said a universe of things.

Be quick. We have much to discuss. Teresa started toward him, but he held up a hand. Wait for me? She nodded and he turned back.

Booker, standing on a step halfway down the stairwell, sank his hands into his coat pockets and looked over his shoulder at the banners hanging on the face of the Metro. He sighed as Alek approached, his breath pluming in the near-dark.

A moment of silence pa.s.sed, and then another. And then he said, ”I remember a time when we stood at a window and you shouted at me, and I think the entire house shook for you.” He laughed. ”I even remember your face, your expression, that Brooklyn-born don't-the- f.u.c.k-get-in-my-way look you were wearing.

Funny the things we remember most.”

”I don't have a sword,” Alek said, stopping a step below his brother, their gazes even.

”But the house shook. It was yours. It was always yours.”

”The house was his, Book.”

Booker sighed once more, looked at him, past him. His flesh was beaded with the sweat of his unreleased energy. Alek watched the falling snow melt off his face and shoulders in tiny, running rivulets of moisture.

He was an island of suffocating warmth in the midst of the cold night. ”Do you really believe I want to kill you, brother?” he asked.

”Yeah.”

Book laughed miserably and the heat was gone. ”Should know better than to try and outfeel an empath. You f.u.c.kers know other folks' feelings better than your own.”

”But you won't do it. Yet.”

Book snorted, looked away. ”I should. I'm really thinking about it, Alek.”

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