Part 27 (1/2)

Sean/Amadeus laughed and Alek recognized the music of the ages of the earth in his hollow voice. The boom of the cras.h.i.+ng sea, of thunder, the whirr of insects, the creep of a snake and all things elemental. ”I am Covenmaster. All this I command. All that you see is mine. Tell me, what do you have, Slayer?”

His voice came unbidden, without thought. ”What I have is what I am. Free.” He tossed back his hair to show the lack of a torc about his neck.

Sean/Amadeus smiled with his hybrid of a mouth. ”Then you have nothing. Your freedom is a lie. Your life has been in vain. And your love is bitter, Slayer. You are nothing. You were always nothing.” He nodded solemnly at his Children.

The creatures smiled eagerly. Together they drove Alek to his knees, pinned his arms to his back until his body was striped with pain Alek choked and cursed the name of Amadeus in the oldest languages of the earth. Yet still the slayers forced his head down, down. And now he saw the currents of ichor lapping in mirrored waves at the pedestal of the Coventable. The creatures pressed his face to the substance and he breathed in its coppery sweetness and its venom. So foul. He tasted the Coven and his master's kisses. He screamed and the ichor filled his throat, choked off and stole his final breath...

”Enough Amadeus. Begone,” came a savage little whisper out of the dark.

Amadeus was gone and his Children with him. Just like that. Like magic, an enchantment.

Alek gasped and came up like the drowning man he was. He drank in a greedy mouthful of untainted air and turned to find the owner of the new voice. His true savior. And in that turning the dream turned as well as so often dreams do.

He stood alone in the dark, alone but for a tall woman in a black silk gown and veil, narrow as a stalk, standing at a distance like a mourner at a gravesite, an aura of angel light on her sapphire hair. Savior, he wanted to say, Sweet sweet savior. The woman in her mourning veil and gown beckoned to him, and he rose up immediately and started after her as she began to walk away.

She walked very fast and he had to hurry to keep up with her. He drew abreast of her. He so desperately wished to see the unearthly face of his angel, but her layers of netting veil concealed her features completely from him. All he could see were her eyes. Red, he thought. Red like roses. Yes.

”You saved me,” he said.

”Oh yes.”

”Why?”

”It waits on you.”

”What waits?”

”You know.”

”The Ninth Chronicle? The Chronicle is false.”

”It waits on you, the false Chronicle.”

He touched her arm. ”Who are you?” The woman stopped. ”Don't you know, beloved?” she asked and turned to face him and drew away her veils like a bride of the night. She sighed and looked on him with such gentle grief. ”I lied,” Debra said. ”I saved you for myself. I was always a selfish creature, but you know that, my most beloved.”

Strange that he should feel no fear or astonishment. Only love--love and regret and the sweetest sorrow he'd ever known. Debra. Yet not Debra. Yet her nonetheless. Some new and different Debra. An older Debra.

The woman Debra. Her features ached beauty and her image wounded him like a sword.

He whispered her name like a prayer, the deepest part of his soul begging him to reach out and touch her pale perfect cheek, if only to prove that she was real, that she was really here now, with him.

Yet he held back in the end. He'd failed her, failed her so often in so many ways. He didn't deserve this reunion, if reunion was what this was.

She smiled with infinite sadness. ”You never failed me. You promised to love me forever and you kept your promise.”

Alek hesitated a moment, contemplated her words. Then he slid to his knees and wept, utterly destroyed by the strength of her absolution. ”I believe now, I do. But I can't do it,” he wept to her feet. He kissed them.

He laid himself prostrate before her like a repentant at the feet of a saint, his body wracked with sobs. ”I can't find the book. I don't know what to do, Debra. I can't--”

”Hush. You can't find your way because you do not have the proper map.” She touched his hair and he looked up. She was smiling sadly and offering him her hand. ”Take it, Alek. Fly with me. One final time. Fly with me, beloved, as if we are still children.”

”I don't understand.”

”Then don't.”

He hesi t ated only a moment more; then he placed his hand in hers.

They flew, fast and high over rivers of obsidian punctured with stars and silver monoliths corkscrewed into deadly points. They dropped like a breath, soared through darkness and through light, and where they pa.s.sed he saw daybirds on their wires and ledges and high places pluck their heads from beneath their wings and fly with them. They flocked around the twins, guided and escorted them, above and below and all around them, so that everywhere Alek looked he saw nettles of starlings and pigeons, the loose brotherhoods of crow.

Debra? What is this?

Your spectators, beloved. They wait on the final conflict. They stand at the door you seek.

And that door?

She looked down upon their most sacred altar.

He looked as well and he saw and suddenly he knew. There.

There, she agreed. Byron hid it there in his last moments. Because I told him to.

But that's so easy.

Yes, of course.

Alek felt that familiar stir in his chest, that thrill. He wanted so to spiral down and touch that sacred, magical place, if only momentarily. To visit it with her like children with his young hungry heart, to adventure there, to be with her, to be young and silly and free and full of the power of the night--but now she was pulling him back, drawing him up with her, up and away, as easily as smoke caught on a thorn of the wind.

Debra?

Hush, beloved. There will be time for what you must do. For now let there be only this. Only us.

She drew him to her completely, her arms around his neck, her face buried against his throat. And real, oh yes, all of it. He sensed the demanding friction of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s against his chest, her soft, thick, feathery hair real, wreathing them both like her black veils and skirts as they drifted together on the current of the nightwind. And when he kissed and wors.h.i.+pped the redness of her mouth and stroked the long line of her thigh through her gossamer gown and saw the light of mischief and desire in her eyes, it was real, every touch and every sigh. Real, all of it. Real though they clung as ephemeral as wraiths above their midnight metropolis; real though only one of them truly lived.

Impossible, he thought. I dream. Perhaps. But dream with me now, beloved. Make for us some strange new world and in that world make love to me. I've waited so long.

Alek smoothed away the veil of her hair from her face and kissed her desperately, almost fiercely. And there, she tasted the same, the blood of some immortal saint and the dew on roses at midnight. So good and sweet.

His love. I adore you, my beloved, my mate, he told her. And then he made their sacred world and it was down in that infinite other place, a place of light and shadows, color and darkness, that he laid her down and he loved her.

Sean dreamt, and his dreams were all red steel and full of the memory of pain. Pain that bloomed and stretched and turned him inside out, absorbing him, until he was the pain and the pain was him and Sean Stone was only the dream...

He awoke in blindness and in the echo of pain, in confusion. He mewled and pushed himself up against his bed's headboard.

His face ached righteously, man. He touched his face and remembered. Remembered Doc Book's work of putting him back together again, putting together what his feeding could not heal, every screaming, sutured inch of it--and before, what Alek Knight had down to him on the stage of the Empress. The rage, the unfairness of it. Oh, run while you can, man, 'cause you are mine, man. Mine. The memory hurt like pain, like a migraine to all his face...

But there--the pain was going away. Sean found the abrasive end of the sutures and pulled the silvery-red threads from his face one at a time. Then he touched his pretty face, and sure, there were still st.i.tchings of pain and a general tenderness, but, man, he was whole again.

Oh yeah.

Quick--a mirror. He took the sword--Alek's sword lying beside his bed--by the hilt and found his face in its burnished body. Yeah. Double yeah. Gorgeous. He looked like a million bucks again.