Part 28 (1/2)
”That Roman wh.o.r.e--?.”
”Not her. The other. The first.”
”Who?”
”Debra.”
”Who is Debra?”
”Death.”
Sean's flesh hardened as if touched in every place by a steel sword. He scratched at his collar, his sleeves.
”What...what do we do?”
”Prepare. When he is finished he...they will come for me.”
”s.h.i.+t.”
The Father was silent momentarily. And then he said, with purpose, ”I have been doomed by a prophecy I have no power over. Death has marked me. But I refuse to die at the hands of an infidel.”
Sean s.h.i.+vered. ”What...can I do for you, Father?”
”Vel caeco appareat.”
Sean said, ”'It would be apparent even to a blind man.'” And laughed, amazed with himself, that he should understand the words.
Amadeus nodded. ”Then too, my beloved, you know what must be done.”
”Ah...well, no.”
”Take me.” Horrified, Sean looked at him.
But the Father only said, breaking his pose and reaching for him, framing his face in his long hands and kissing him with sad pa.s.sion, ”It is time, no? You have been awaiting this. Your desire. The Rite of Covenmaster is yours. Drink of me and be complete. Drink until I move within you, my beautiful slayer.”
Sean hesitated, groaned, s.h.i.+vered. He wanted to protest, but then came his master's lips on his throat, caressing his thirst, his need, his hunger to be...more. More than some little wh.o.r.egirl's punching bag, more than Slim Jim's young prey or Alek Knight's rebellious little acolyte, more than the Stone Man. More than a punk stereotype with cotton between his ears. More-- But he would be what?
And all at once, Sean was afraid. Amadeus had lied. He was not a vampire, at least not the kind he had come to understand as real, the kind he was and Alek was and all or most of them were. He was not a victim of Lilithine blood. A subspecies of the human race. He was less, and more. A servant to strange forces, stranger understandings. A demon, a wraith. A beast and a priest and both borne of a savagery he had never known in all his life. Hungry. Starved. Incomplete. And some part of Sean's expanding intellect tried to reason this out, what Amadeus was with what he did, and failed.
After this Communion, this pa.s.sionate exchange of blood, what was he--Sean--to be?
What in h.e.l.l was he to be?
The cold kiss. The stab of bone-sharp teeth. The hiss of an uncoiling nest of snakes all about them. And in the spinning private cloister of Sean's mind he heard the answer: You will be everything you have always wanted to be...and everything you have ever feared. You will be Amadeus.
”But...” He gasped. That mouth. It was on him, in him, a living thing, separate from the Father, with its own hungers and desires. Sean shuddered yet again, leaned against the Father as the Father fed off of him, giving up the strength and red life so easily that the Father had lent him earl i er. Yes, he understood how that had happened now. What drove it. What had driven them both to destroy the girl. The hunger...nothing was like it in the whole world, nothing at all. Love was like that hunger. And now it was as if he were being loved by some underworld G.o.d. Hades. Satan. Set. It was as if he were being eaten alive by a cannibal lover. The girl...she had know this and willingly endured it. The h.e.l.l that was heaven...
Through the veil of pa.s.sion, Sean fought for his thoughts, his fears. ”But...I only...only wanted to be something...more.”
The mouth let him go. The beautiful and bloodslathered and unkind teeth let him go. ”You will be everything.”
”Everything...” Sean murmured as Amadeus held him close and stroked his throat, kissed his mouth and the chains of his tears, laid upon his face his b.l.o.o.d.y lip prints until the touch and taste and smell was so great, his hunger so far greater, he thought he might weep or die or simply implode from the force of it. Sean leaned into his master, felt no desires but that for giving in. The choices had all been made and be understood that the time for protest was over. It had ended the day he took the Father's hand and escaped the dorm with him. It had ended the day Slim Jim died and left a child with blood and mucus all over his face sitting on the floor, afraid to move, to even breathe.
And strange that in this moment of which he'd dreamt so long and so hard that his thoughts be filled not with images of Amadeus, nor even his mother, but of Alek Knight.
Alek. He had run. He'd escaped this.
Why?
”I will make of you a G.o.d on the earth,” the Father whispered against his mouth, ”a G.o.d whom none will again harm. No more hurt. eternal and unstoppable and accountable to no G.o.d for your sins.”
”No hurt,” Sean repeated, and he was not surprised that he wept keenly into the frost of his masters' hair, the sight of a dead man's shredded bloodless throat glowing at the center of his mind like an ember. And the woman--the woman torn like a doll. ”Oh Jesus, Father, I love you. Save me, please. Please save me.” The words did not seem foolish and they did not embarra.s.s him, and as he wors.h.i.+pped his master's face and hair with his kisses he felt his terror lessen. His soul and savior and power, he thought. How he wanted to die for Amadeus, crack his soul open upon the rock of the Father's divinity.
And when pressure at the back of his skull brought his kisses to the Father's throat he scarcely knew it or cared.
”Drink me,” Amadeus invited. ”Drink me and become.”
Sean kissed him deeply with his every pa.s.sion, kissed and licked at his master's throat and the thin gla.s.s of flesh which was all that separated him from his eternity. His teeth ached and his mind screamed. And when his time came and he could hold off no longer, Amadeus held him fiercely and crooned to him in languages he could not fathom.
Booker dreamt, and in his dreams he walked upon a red desert full of white skulls. They were ancient things beneath his feet, those skulls, thin as eggsh.e.l.ls. And where he walked they shattered, and where they shattered came the angry red geysers of their ghosts. The sky above him was cramped and low, a mocking backwards-running river of blood. Horrible, all of it, like something Alek might paint on a good day. f.u.c.king Dali. Where the h.e.l.l was the exit?
Booker walked on, searching, but he did not hurry, because to hurry would mean to burst more of the skulls under his feet. He walked on and he kept his eyes steady on the flat, h.e.l.lish horizon far ahead, for he knew if he looked down he would see the millions of empty, screaming eye sockets beseeching him, and that would be too much; that would drive him mad.
He walked in that h.e.l.l for a thousand years. He walked until, at last, he came upon them. And stopped.
Upon a bed of bleached bones they loved. Booker watched them without shame and without revulsion. It was only proper after all that on their wedding day they should have a witness. They were both naked but wreathed in red silk and in the pearled sweat of their effort. He saw the pale narrow serpent of Alek's back, and he saw Debra beneath him, alive, a woman, innocent and seductive where she clung to her mate, her hair a mystical web of darkness spilling out and out around them, encircling them, binding them together.
Forever.
Booker envied Alek his angel. He always had.
A.
nd fr om his angel Alek drank, her precious blood lighting his flesh from within like light though a crimson window.
And slowly, as Booker watched, Debra greyed and withered in the arms of her twin, her flesh and bones brittling, cracking herself apart for him, to give and to nourish him. Spent at last, she was all red silk and sand in Alek's hands, her hair like the dark pelt of a fine kill.
Booker frowned. ”You've killed her,” he said.
Alek looked up at him with his narrow, flushed-red eyes, and Book knew then his mistake. Alek said, ”I have become.”
And Booker Jefferson jerked awake to the flickering, cinematic darkness of his Lexington Avenue penthouse apartment living room with its Klee originals and French lithographs and sunken Jacuzzi whirlpool. On the flat TV the Sat.u.r.day night silent film was on, Fritz Murnau's cla.s.sic, Nosferatu. Lousy joke. Booker stared at the blueness of the screen, at Count Orlock moving like animated death toward a victim all lily-skinned and innocent. He looked away, at his pale, grey, characterless furniture, the weepy neutral carpet and noncolored walls. Again the lithos, every one a mint and worth more than most blue collar workers made in a year.
On the floor by the door was his imported seven-hundred-dollar London Fog where he had carelessly dropped it on entering, and he thought absently, When the h.e.l.l did this happen? When did I go from being a Spike Lee-inspired tenement homey boy to f.u.c.king pampered Donald Trump? When the h.e.l.l did I stop being an in-your-f.u.c.king-face streetsmart kid like Alek?
Alek. He touched his brow and found it misted wet. His hand clenched into a fist, trembled slightly, and dropped onto the wooden armrest of his chair. He split the mahogany finish like kindling.