Part 27 (2/2)

His tongue rasped across his fully self-restructured teeth and full pink lips. Whatever else all those slayers b.i.t.c.hed and complained about like sorry-for-their-own-a.s.ses antiheroes in them books and movies, being a vamp, (even half a vamp) sure as h.e.l.l had its advantages. Now if only he wasn't so d.a.m.ned hungry. Could feel his own backbone, man. Maybe he'd drive through Mickey D's tonight and pick up that juicy little window girl who always blushed and giggled and bleated like a sheep when he winked at her.

How did that song from Cutting Crew go? ”I just died in your arms tonight,” Sean sang and giggled, fell back to the mattress, still giggling, rolling with it.

And that's when the body of the wh.o.r.e fell off his bed and onto the floor. Hadn't even noticed it there, man.

He looked over the side of the bed, at the redhead's greying face and empty, ceilingward stare. Her throat was gone. Not just chewed and sucked man, but f.u.c.king gone. Her head literally hung by strings. The spinal cord, a few ribbons of bloodless flesh and tendon, not much.

Jesus.

Had he done that?

He tried to remember what had happened after the Empress. The march. Trying to catch the rogue. Sucking a few pedestrians in pa.s.sing to keep the psi going and deadened the pain in his face. The blood. The screaming. But not catching the f.u.c.k. Coming back here. Alone.

Alone.

So when had the wh.o.r.e come into play?

Mein Sohn...oh what has become of you?

Sean jerked, remembering now. Remembering...the androidlike woman hovering near like some kind of sacrifice...Amadeus...he shuddered again, more violently...Amadeus feasting, not like some monster in a Hammer film, man, no, not some two-minute Christopher Lee quickie, a lovebite and a few sips. Feasting, man. Like a f.u.c.king animal. The blood a sludgy black rouge on his face and chin and throat and chest. The flesh gnas.h.i.+ng, the cartilage crunching audibly between the subhuman teeth. Jesus, those teeth...

And then those teeth, that searing hot mouth on his, not biting, but offering the gift of raw red copper-iron strength in a liquid regurgitation of life itself-- Sean swallowed, giggled hysterically and drew back away from the sight of the wh.o.r.e, his fingers on his mouth, feeling the obnoxious crust of dried blood, his and the woman's, all over his lips and teeth and chin.

He looked again at the body of the woman and realized he had to make a physical effort not to get down on his knees and bury his face in the awful remains. He bit the ham of his hand to stifle the insane noises his mouth was making, but the action only made him grunt and quickly open his jaws. His teeth felt sharper, more prominent, if that was possible. Was that possible? What the h.e.l.l was possible anymore? He was some half-human freak living a nightmare inside of a nightmare. And now he had drunk the life out of some c.u.n.t who could have been his f.u.c.king mother!

Quite abruptly, the whimper gathering in his throat died at the sight of the black bathrobe cast over the foot of his bed. He centered his attention on it because it wasn't his, it was the Father's, and it was something else to look at other than the corpse congealing in a pool of black gore on his bedroom floor. A corpse that had been violated worse than anything that Sean, even with his extensive experience at the Shangri-La, and with Slim Jim, had ever seen.

He crawled like a little boy to the foot of the bed. Curious, he touched the fabric.

Not a bathrobe. A habit.

Put it on, Sean.

With a cry of surprise he leapt from the bed and looked around his room, at the concert posters on the walls, the storybooks and bone collections and CDs scattered wide, at the open-door armoire of falling-out clothes.

But no one was hidden here among his things. He was alone.

Put on the habit, beloved, said the voice inside his head more directly.

Oh. Only the Father and his hocus-pocus. Well...all right.

Sean slid out of the sheer, bloodwashed-stiff nights.h.i.+rt the Father had dressed him in and shrugged into the habit, struggled with some of the little hook and eyelets, gave up on the rest of them, the ones nearest the small of his back where he couldn't quite reach. He stretched and moved around the bed, trying to get a feel for the material and using the bed to block his view of the corpse. Out of sight of the wh.o.r.e, he found he could think a little more clearly. He went to the full-stretch mirror on the backside of his armoire door.

There was a little too much drag in the hem and sleeves of the habit, but otherwise it was a pretty righteous fit. Quite nice, actually. Quite... impressive. The black did him up well, gave him almost that same big, pale Reaper look the Father had.

He looked closely and realized that even his eyes looked weird. Too light. Pale, whitish blue.

All right, man, now what?

You must be pure. The trinkets--be rid of them.

And almost immediately, without thought or question, Sean unscrewed his facial studs and earrings, broke the wires of teeth around his neck. The pieces shattered like bone on the cell's floor. He touched his face with wonder. What did he look like barren of his trophies? He knew he felt infinitely more powerful somehow, feather-light and capable of flight. Strange and wonderful. Was this the reason the Father chose to live like a f.u.c.king Spartan? Alek too?

He attention returned to the mirror and he was witness to the birth of a new person. He touched the loose yellow silk of his jaw-cut hair, toyed with the idea of letting it go. Long. Rock-musician long. Long enough to plait. Long like Amadeus's was long. He saw himself then: long pale hair and black habit. Pale, somber eyes.

A priest? Yeah, a priest, or at least, priestlike. He though yet again of the wh.o.r.e, and suddenly the thought of living like a priest didn't seem like such a ludicrous idea after all. Before the mirror, he genuflected in the invisible presence of his Coven. ”Welcome. I am the Covenmaster Stone Man,” he stated, tasting the words and grimacing.

That really sucked.

Inspired, he went through the gesture again. ”I am the Covenmaster...Amadeus. I am the Chosen. All that you see I comm--”

Yes, my son. The new temple of Amadeus.

Sean choked, caught in mid-bow, stiffening like a little boy caught doing something obscene to himself. He blushed in the face of the Father's s.h.i.+ning laughter, lovely and pious and faintly mad, he thought.

The Father was pleased.

Come to me, beloved, commanded the Father. Enter me and become...

The music of the voice drove the dizziness of his hunger away. Drove the nausea of the image of the dead girl on the floor away. It was like in the beginning. This was the lovely coa.r.s.e voice of the strange man he had found sitting on the sill of his State Inst.i.tution dorm room one night upon awakening, eyes like white fire in a face as pale as the full moon which had beat down upon them both. That night the Father had come to him and had known him by name and had spoken those words low and so intimately to him: Come with me and come into the arms of the Coven, mein Sohn, into those arms which love you best of all. And who could love such a thing as you but one of your own?

Yes who? His mother? His mother was dead. And better off that way. Better dead than a slave to a neverending procession of strange men night after night. Better dead, he thought with a sideways glance at the girl, than a victim of a monster.

And so, without hesitation, Sean let himself out of his cell and started down toward the Great Abbey. He did not feel the cold of the twisting corridors carrying him along, nor the stone steps under his feet, meeting them so graciously as he descended into the beauty and immortal secrets of the old house. The Abbey would receive him and there he would see his beautiful, white-faced Father waiting on him, speaking low the words he so cherished. My love...my own.

But when he arrived he found the Father did not sit in his usual perch at the head of the Coventable; instead, he was kneeling on the dais in the shadow of his altar, the wedge of his pressed hands resting at his mouth, his sight miles off.

The chandelier had been lit, its whitish power bruising the stone walls of the Abbey and blus.h.i.+ng the strong old faces on the tapestries. A halo of it circled the Father like an angelic laser of light. Some alien spotlight capable of practically deitizing a man. Sean took in the sight, the chandelier lit for some ceremony, the Abbey itself vacated but for the two of them and a handful of surviving bats irritated to restless flight by the alien impinge of light. Slowly, almost fearfully, he walked to the nave, then up the steps to the dais, so that the two of them, himself and the Father, existed in the Altar's shadow equally.

Sean looked aside at the Father.

Amadeus spoke.

”Alek knows the location of the Chronicle,” said the Father.

Sean shuddered but did not show it. The Chronicle. It was half their problem. Their other half, of course, was Alek himself. But the idea, suddenly, of the two problems coming together, converging--Alek actually getting the d.a.m.ned Chronicle--hung like a dooming storm over Sean's thoughts. That lying piece of s.h.i.+t book was probably enough to totally unbalance the precarious relations.h.i.+p they already had with Rome. Or so said the Father. ”s.h.i.+t. Where?”

Amadeus told him.

”There. Christ, that's dumb.”

”It is fitting. It is the place of beginnings, and it is just that it be the place of his defeat.”

”Is he there now?”

”Nein. His is with her in a place that is closed to me. I know only that he makes love to her, that he drinks of her power and her pa.s.sion.”

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