Part 31 (1/2)

Why?

Didn't know why. Had to-- Where? The city's a big place, fool.

Silly--he knew. Of course he did. He knew this time without Aristotle's insight and stupid suppositions. He knew-- The beginning place.

”Your empathy must be rubbing off, brother,” he said and reached for his coat lying on the floor.

Tahlia cast the cat skull across the full length of her husband's office. It hit the gorgon-face s.h.i.+eld like a missile and clattered to her husband's smoking couch in shards.

In a single sweep she cleared the desk of its homey clutter, blotter and banker's lamp, decanter and Roman amphorae, In Files and Out, Charles's tobacco carousel--which struck his favorite stuffed pheasant down from his perch, so what?--books and maps and the framed portrait of Charles the warrior in fatigues between two other men in a faded grey jungle half a world away. All of it in a noisy waterfall to the floor.

There.

Exhaustion displacing rage, Tahlia slumped against the edge of the desk, one hand in her sweaty hair and the other over her heart. You are long over the hill, Tally, whatever the face may say. Gonna give yourself a heart attack. Yeah.

”No!” she answered, and strange this voice: it was not her own. It was the voice of some other Tahlia, some younger Tahlia. The voice of the woman who had sat all night in a cafe on Columbus Street listening to bad beat-generation verse and rattling her gla.s.s and stomping her feet with the best of them as the rest of her withered and curled up like an old rose and died inside. The woman whose heart knew that Byron was never late, never in all their thirteen years late for one of their dates, and that late tonight meant something more than late. The woman who knew that like she knew these Beatniks and their lousy poetry but who was too much a coward to admit to it. The woman who had drunk herself into a vermouth-inspired stupor that night and then drove home to her converted loft apartment in the Brooklyn Heights and cried herself to sleep and stayed, aching, in that bed for three whole days, nursing the horrible knowledge she had like a disease. That woman, the voice of the woman ages younger and not a little feral with emotion, a voice armored in steel and war and all the things that were lost forever.

This new-old Tahlia sobbed, ”It can't end this way, kid. Please, please don't let it end this way.” And that Tahlia went to her knees in sobs on the floor of her husband's office with the pulsing pounds of gaiety just beyond the walls but years out of reach.

28.

The moon rose and the carrion birds came. Slowly her wounds bled and steadily her pain increased. It seemed as if the nightwind were on fire where it touched her body and the sky was full of screams. The sound of the birds pecking at and squabbling over her b.l.o.o.d.y flesh--her wrists and her face and her b.l.o.o.d.y barren womb where the Covenmaster had chosen to send the final spike instead of her heart--was enough to drive her mad. The birds polluted her mind as badly as her body. All she had to look forward to was the rising sun, when the world would turn red and it would be over. She hoped it was soon; more, she hoped she felt nothing.

Time wore on. Breathing on her broken back was a nightmare. Existence itself was a greater horror. How she prayed to die, then, not for the first time ever, no, but never with such vehemence. She cursed G.o.d and Lilith and Paris and Alek Knight and all those who had sent her down her path of destiny to be here now in this living h.e.l.l. She wept, feeling a horrible void of self-pity opening up beneath her and sucking her down its great length. Where was grace now, now that she needed it? Where was mercy? She had not disobeyed her G.o.d, nor her destiny. Only they had conspired to set her up against an invincible foe. There was no hope for the world, she realized. The slayers were worse than the monsters they chased. And they were spreading across the face of the earth, slowly, calculatingly, maiming and destroying, making a barren No Man's Land of her people's world.

Her people. They would never know the secret of their blood now. The secret of their true origin. Now, with the Chronicle back in the hands of the churchmen, they would never know safety again.

The birds found her inner secrets through the hole in her loins and she heard herself scream inside her own head, heard the ringing echo of her own tormented, skybound curses.

And that was when the man came and stood beside her in her darkness and her agony, the man in the cleric's robes. Not robes like now, finely-crafted and sewn with threads of gold. This was a cleric of the Reformation, the Renaissance. The learned, worldly cleric in rough black robes and a tarnished papal cross that was all he had to denote his statue in life. He was tall and lean, his long, white-blonde hair combed back carefully over his ears. She looked at his beautiful hands, his piercing black, pious eyes, and felt her heart stutter inside of her. She had forgotten the light he could emanate despite his darkness. The beautiful torment of his touch, his kisses. She had forgotten...so much. ”Paris,” she said through numbed lips.

He put one finger to his lips. Shhh. He smiled. My beloved. His eyes flicked aside to where she thought the betrayer Aragon must be standing. It was so hard to tell, pinned to the ground like she was. Lost in the dark the way she was. ”Someone might hear,” he whispered in his native Dutch.

”Take me home,” she gasped in her native Italian. She could not remember Dutch. She could not remember anything, her pain was so great.

”Not yet,” he said with gentle patience. And then he looked on her with such love that she could not find the pain anymore. It was as if he had eaten it all up with his gentle, wanting gaze. ”My Teresa,” he said. ”Will you give up on yourself?”

She shook her head no.

Paris smiled and beckoned to her. ”I'm waiting.”

”I...no, Paris...”

The others might have heard her, except that Paris had cast the birds away and their escape was like thunder.

She was sitting up, her hands torn and frayed to rags but set like stone around the end of the railroad spike protruding from her womb. She gripped it, her hands burning like wax around the cursed metal, and pulled the spike from her belly. It came out of her like the scream she dared not utter. She lay down again on the ground, for a moment so overcome with sickness she wondered if she would ever move again, if she couldn't simply pa.s.s this cup by. If Paris wouldn't simply forgive her and come get her.

Will you give up on yourself, my Teresa?

Somehow she managed to sit up again, to climb like a staggering victim of battle to her feet. Her back was partially mended, but her hands bled. Her womb bled. She was hungry, so hungry. The iron's poison was still in her veins, but perhaps it had lost some of its potency. She took one step, and then she took another.

She saw she was coming slowly upon the two who had crucified her. They were mere fuzzy black images, her vision was so bad. She closed her eyes and found she could track them better by their warmth. The slayers, the small one and the bully, stood a dozen paces apart and watching their master twine with Alek Knight on the ground before the carousel. She was closest to the bully. She withdrew Paris's knife.

It felt heavy in her hand, but to give up now...Paris would never forgive her. She took yet another step.

And then she was upon the bully.

She never did like the cross.

A silly, stupid thought, but the one that gripped his mind in the moment before it happened. Over the Father's shoulder, Alek watched the a.s.sault. Such a small, weak-looking creature, and yet when provoked she was like a battalion, unstoppable and extraordinary. He watched her sink the knife into the back of Robot's head, through skull and blood and grey matter, all of which exited the wound she made in a loose, chunk-filled geyser. Robot made a sound--a peculiar sound like a cobra taken from behind by a weasel, perhaps the only sound he had ever made in his whole long life--and dropped lifelessly to his face a mere dozen yards from Aristotle. And yet, so captivated was Aristotle by the Rite before him, the whole a.s.sault went completely unnoticed by him.

Teresa pulled the knife loose from the sucking cavity of the slayer's skull and put her mouth there a moment, taking some nourishment from the wound. Then she took a few shambling steps forward, and, with her resurgent strength, plunged it into Aristotle's back. Aristotle wasn't so silent. Aristotle screamed b.l.o.o.d.y murder, falling to the ground and scrabbling at the gravel path like a c.o.c.kroach some poor fool had impaled on the floor of his Bronx tenement apartment.

Amadeus jerked away and turned. ”You,” he whispered the word like a snake hissing a warning. And then he let loose with a torrent of almost tangible psi force.

Like a block of mortar cast into a peaceful stream, the shockwaves rippled out. Alek felt it in those first seconds, the spun web of terrible force spinning out like a net, the threads of living violence collapsing the foliage around them, rippling the earth and seeking its victim. Carnage. A canopy of rickety maples crackled inward in a cavity, pulverized as if a great and invisible giant had pa.s.sed there. A cannonball of wild energy ricocheted off the street between two stalled cars, cratering the asphalt, then crossed the avenue like a skipping stone and burst against the face of the Metropolitan, tearing down the Horses of San Marco banner. A small awry sphere buffeted past Alek and bounced around the inner canopy of the carousel in dreamcatcher pattern. And in that moment he thought of himself and Sean in another close place in another time with Sean's psi a demented wraith seeking its return current. Alek saw the force go to Teresa like a speeding subway train, like a trained pit bull terrier set loose on its hapless victim. Teresa raised her arms, but it would never be enough, never.

Alek closed his eyes, opened his mind to Amadeus's stolen psi. He called to it sweetly and softly. And like a fish it sought its birth fount.

The energy struck Amadeus squarely in the chest. Not like a fish. Like an iron musket ball.

The force split the two of them apart like a hammered bone, struck Amadeus from the stage and cast Alek in the opposite direction, into a straight steel panel of the carousel house.

Hurt in his skull and eyes. His stomach, oh G.o.d, his stomach. Alek blinked and then dropped over into the track, touched his face to it in agony as the venom churned like steel knives in his belly. He tried to feel himself, but himself was like a distant character he no longer had any interest in. Red, searing pain. Black despair. Loss. It was as if those two colors were the only ones left in all the world. To die--perhaps then he would be free of this pain. He arched and slammed his face against the floor of the carousel. The pain lessened, then came cras.h.i.+ng back like a tidal wave. He fell to his side, immobilized by it.

Darkness.

From far away he tasted once more the shed blood of a G.o.ddess. Achingly sweet. Foreign but potent. Before his mind even knew it, his body was hungrily sucking up the substance. A swallow. And then another. Pain.

But it was the pain of mending. The itch of recovery. After a few moments the flow lessened, and at first he thought it was because his body was running out of blood, but then he realized it was because his body was healing, turning back on its own strength, which should have been impossible with so much of the master's blood and will inside of him. Yet after a moment or two his vision cleared and he was able to see clearly again.

Teresa lay beside him, feeding him blood from her own cupped hand.

He shook himself. For a moment he thought it meant she was recovering. But then he saw that her horrible wounds had not healed at all. Her eyes halved, registering his sorrow but smiling even now. Even now, with her hair cruelly cropped and her face a map of half-healed scars, she was alluring and ancient and provocative. He wanted her, even in her curtain of red death.

”Only enough life--for you,” she said.

He pushed her hand away. ”No...”

”You are only hope.” She forced yet more of her blood down his throat, feeding him from the gaping red wounds on her wrists, forcing him to feed by stroking his throat like a child might a sick kitten, and it was suddenly as if the current of her life and the many lives she had taken and made her own was overwhelming the invading will. He gasped and swallowed, and he felt it die slowly within him. A warm silence stole over his body. He was certain the Father's venom in his system had been nullified. Yet inside he was still in torment. Even as he sat up, Teresa seemed to lose strength and lay back down. The wounds in her were ma.s.sive and black with gangrene, the rot of the iron shot almost entirely through her system, and he cringed because he feared that if any more of her flesh was eaten up by this cancer that he would see her heart beating, or slowing down. He tried to open a wound in his wrist, to drip blood over her parched and broken lips, but she stopped him.

”Too late,” she said. She shook her head.

Another death. Another death he could not bear.

”No,” he moaned.