Slayer: Black Miracles

by Karen Koehler

  He nodded while keeping an ever-watchful eye on Samson. “Now that we’ve had formal introductions, let’s get down to it, shall we?”

  Samson let his hands dropped. There were throwing knives in each hand. Alek knew. He could smell the steel. As Samson let fly the twin daggers, Alek was already in the air, tumbling like an acrobat over Samson and landing with catlike agility behind him. It took Samson a whole second to realize his knives had found tree trunks and not his target. A whole second more to realize where his target had gone. Alek waited patiently as the slayer figured it all out and turned around. He could have taken the slayer’s head at any point during that two-second interval, but that didn’t seem too sporting. The fear was distant now as the war lust began to overtake him and make him playful and more dangerous. Alek hesitated. If there was any way they could just settle this like human beings instead of like animals...?

  Samson narrowed his seething black eyes.

  No, I guess not.

  “Last chance to walk away,” Alek said.

  Samson drew his tachi and tanto. The tachi was a good piece of work, forty-six inches of priceless jade and polished stainless steel. The tanto was the companion piece to the tachi, at a quarter of the length. Nice, both of them. Alek only wondered if Samson had the kata training necessary to brandish them as more than pretty ornaments.

  Alek made an underarm slash at the tanto with his sword, knocking it from Samson’s grip.

  Guess not, again.

  Samson looked momentarily confused, torn between diving for his fallen weapon and retreating so he could prepare a new assault with his tachi alone.

  “Don’t pick up the tanto. I’ll give you a penalty,” Alek warned him.

  Samson backed up, transferring the tachi into a two-handed grip.

  “It’s not a broadsword,” Alek said. “You use one hand.”

  “Whatta you? The fucking expert?” Samson spat and dove at him with the sword.

  Alek winged the weapon aside, metal ringing on metal, and let the motion take him clockwise around Samson and into his enemy’s second assault. Metal skreeked. Alek shoved at the other slayer. Samson fell back, almost dropping his sword.

  Samson recovered at the last moment and made a blurring series of butterfly cuts that send Alek stumbling back a half dozen steps. Samson grinned. When Alek sensed the nearness of the carousel at his back, he dropped to the ground and rolled out of the way. Samson followed through with the move, trying to stab Alek through the heart with the tachi.

  Alek rolled over and used his coat to deflect Samson’s blade, giving him an opportunity to leap to the top of the stage. “Yes,” Alek answered as he sat down on the edge of the carousel, his hair settling against his cheeks, his coat closing about the rest of him like a pair of settling wings. He drew the sword back into its ready position. “I am.”

  Samson stared angrily at Alek’s show of casual disregard for his skill. Angry and confused. He was a fear-eater, as Alek had suspected. A bully. If his victim was not intimidated by his outward appearance then he had no advantage in the fight. Samson showed his teeth and cut the air menacingly in front of him as he reassured his grip on the tachi. Pretty Kung Fu movie display there.

  Alek rested the hilt of the katana on his thigh.

  “You think you’re so tough,” Samson growled.

  “Tough enough. Go home, whelp, and learn your craft first.”

  You’re so clever, Debra said.

  He smirked. She knew what affect it would have on Samson as much as he did.

  Samson roared and sprang at Alek, his tachi fully extended and ready to take Alek’s head.

  Alek rolled up onto the stage again, his sentient coat snagging Samson’s legs and jerking them out from under him so the bigger man tripped to the muddy ground in a rolling, clattering bundle of leather and steel. Samson slammed into the side of the carousel, his bulk rattling the structure to its foundations. He was raging when he realized how he had been tricked but recovered faster than Alek anticipated.

  By the time Alek had found his footing on the carousel, Samson was up and leaping to the top of the stage and swinging at him with the tachi. Alek met the slayer stroke for stroke, their blades clashing like cymbals and kicking up sparks that lit the darkness of the night like firebugs. When the battle of the blades wasn’t getting Samson anywhere, he changed tactics and tried to swipe at Alek’s legs. Tried to hack at them, really, which was poor form. One of Amadeus’s first and most important lessons was to never, ever, attack in anger. Anger was a Wild Emotion...and a liability in a fight. Alek sidestepped the blade and kicked Samson in the face.

  Samson flew off the carousel and crashed to the ground under a vast, sprawling elm several yards away. He looked to be out cold.

  Alek hesitated a moment, then stepped down off the stage and started stalking the slayer.

  Samson suddenly came awake and tossed two more knives at him.

  Alek avoided the one, knocked aside the other with his sword.

  He was ten feet away.

  Two more knives came flying at his face. Alek knocked those aside. “Boring.”

  Five feet.

  Samson stood up, and gritting his savage white teeth, pulled his magnum loose, cocked it, aimed. Iron bullets, Debra had said. Deadly venom. The only metal fatal to what he was. Fatal to all of his kind.

  Well that’s not fair at all! Debra said.

  No, not at all, Alek agreed as he felt his--their--blood boil. The first bullet whistled past his shoulder. The second pinked! off the blade of his sword. He kept making his way toward Samson.

  Samson looked frightened. He squeezed off two more rounds. Alek slipped in-between the two bullets

  Two bullets left.

  Two feet left.

  Samson made a valiant attempt to aim for Alek’s head.

  Alek bit down on the blade of his sword and leaped, easily clearing the last two bullets and gripping the low-hanging branches of the oak overhead like an athlete’s training bar. His legs came up automatically, hooking around the biggest limb of the tree so his hands were free to handle the sword. And there he hung, looking at a petrified and very upside down Samson like a great winged bat hanging from its perch.

  “Penalty,” Alek said in the last moment before he took Samson’s head.

  5

  He wondered if he would make it home in time for Jay Leno. Considering all things, the thought seemed somehow ridiculous, yet it was thinking like that that kept him sane throughout all the bloodshed.

  Near Fifth Avenue Alek stopped to make certain none of Samson’s blood remained on any noticeable part of himself. His hair, which had been bound into a tight braid for his supposedly quiet evening out, had come undone but had otherwise been spared. His face was likewise clean. His coat was never dirtied by bloodshed for very long; instead it seemed to somehow absorb any blood that touched it. The fact that it did so might have made him nervous, except he was used to dealing with things that were...well, less than normal.

  He had almost made it to the curb where he hoped he would be able to hail another cab when he heard the cries for the first time. They were distant. Another human being would not have been aware of them at all, especially this close to the neverending roar of the busiest avenue in New York, but he was wired from the fight. He stopped to tilt his head and listen to them. Coming from three blocks away, in one of the back alley niches no sane person had any business crawling around in. Probably some punk trying to feed the monkey by working over a drunk.

  No...not a drunk. It was a female in trouble. Probably a working girl in a lousy situation.

  He glanced around the Avenue, but as always, never a cop when you needed one.

  It’s not my problem, he reasoned. It’s been a long night already.

  A cab pulled to the curb. He couldn’t believe his luck.

  The girl made a pained, animalistic noise that rang in his ears and in his bones.

  “Fuck,” he whispered as he waved the cab on. I will g
et a personal driver, he promised himself as he turned down the first alley he came to and leaped to the fire escape. He scaled it to the lowest window available. From there on it was an easy enough task to pull himself hand over hand over the face of the building. It was an old brownstone, plenty of windows and fancy cornices to use as a makeshift ladder. When he reached the roof he hurried to the opposite end, jumped the ten-foot crevice between this building and the next, and landed in a crouching lope atop the second rooftop. He repeated the action a second and then a third time, until he found himself looking down into a filthy alleyway cluttered with garbage and an overturned Dumpster. A Caddy was parked at the end of the dead end space, preventing anybody from driving into the throat of the alley. The building he was crouched atop was derelict, the opposite one a thrash club so loud it was unlikely anyone would ever hear a cry for help.

  There were three of them. Asian kids with ying-yang bandanas and cheap juvie hall tattoos. Yakuza wannabes. Runners and students of the street arts. And they were doing over one of the working girls.

  One of his girls.

  Turf warfare was none of his business. In most cases, he ignored the violence when drunks and dust heads fell prey to the bigger, the fitter, the nastier. The city had a method of survival you didn’t tamper with. But the working girls were his. Well not his in the sense that they belonged to him. They weren’t his personal harem or anything. It was just instinct. In the underworld of the vampire, as savage as it was, the males protected their mates, something the humans had seemed to have forgotten, or perhaps never learned. Where were the males to protect the human females? Where was this one’s mate to protect her? She was alone, threatened, and that pissed him off. He didn’t like cutthroat kids tampering with his females.

  He dropped the six stories and landed atop the overturned Dumpster with an impressive and attention-getting whomp, his coat fluttering down around him like a pair of folding blackbird wings. The boys, clustered around the girl pinned like a bug against the graffiti-splattered wall, turned to look his way.

  Show off, Debra said.

  Alek smiled at the cretins holding the girl, except it wasn’t a smile at all.

  “Motherfucker, where you come from?” one of the endearingly articulate youths said. His red bandana was inscribed with black ideograms that labeled him as the leader.

  Alek wondered what the Yakuza were doing so far west of their home turf. They were primarily Lower East Side and Chinatown. The young ones specialized in arson, minor piracy and basic havoc, but only under the auspicious iron hand of the elders; they weren’t major operators, just little pups who ran errands and begged for bones from the House of the Ryuujin. As the leader jaunted forward Alek caught a glance of the frightened, flushed face of the girl, the red shawl and black little dress, and had to do a double take. Then he shoved such detail aside and concentrated on the chump approaching him.

  The leader pulled a switchblade from his back pocket. One of his associates--a very young boy with a lean and angry face--moved to bring up his rear with a pair of nunchaku, while the third one, a boy with a ponytail held back in an ivory clip, continued to hold the little blonde girl against the wall.

  The girl whimpered and the sound of her cry triggered something inside of Alek. He stared at the three hoods for a long moment, then jumped down off the Dumpster and drew his katana for the second time that night.

  “Why don’t you take a walk?” Nunchaku said.

  “He can’t,” said the leader. “He’s a banpaia--they can’t leave fuckin’ nothing alone.”

  Banpaia. Vampire.

  Well now, this was getting very interesting.

  “If I was a banpaia you would all be dead by now,” Alek said.

  The leader stopped and narrowed his eyes.

  “Let the girl go,” Alek told him reasonably.

  “Shit,” said the leader. “Your kind fuckin’ piss me off. Get lost.”

  “Let her go and I will,” Alek said.

  “Fuck you,” the leader said and tossed a handful of miniature shuriken in Alek’s face.

  This human kid was good. Better in many ways than Samson. More training. More control. More desire to please the Powers That Be. Alek deflected all but a few of the razor-keen stainless steel stars with his coat. As an errand shuriken tore a strip if flesh from his cheek he leaped out of the way and tried to find an advantage atop a fire escape.

  In a truly admirable choreography of battle, Nunchaku caught him in mid-air, numbing his knee in passing with his weapon so he missed the fire escape completely and landed with a grunt on hands and knees at the back of the alley, his sword spinning off into the dark. Another shot of shuriken. Alek took the brunt of it before rolling out of the way. The rest sank like steel darts into the brownstone wall. His face burned and his blood pounded. He tried to rise but his numbed leg wouldn’t give him the leverage he needed.

  “He’s down!” said the leader. He went to replace Ponytail where the boy had been holding the girl against the bricks. “Take his head!”

  Nunchaku and Ponytail were on him in moments. Nunchaku wound his chain around Alek’s neck while Ponytail drew a black shirasaya embossed with golden butterflies. The rod clicked apart to reveal a well cared for antique blade that looked sharp enough to split a hair--or a slayer. Alek didn’t wait to discover if that was true, so he put out his hand and felt the katana skreek across the broken concrete and into his palm. He gripped it securely and jammed the handle into Nunchaku’s mouth. Nunchaku grunted bloodily and the chain of the nunchaku lost its tension a moment before Ponytail’s blade would have found a home in his throat. Alek flattened himself against the concrete and felt the swish of the blade overhead, then dived at Ponytail’s middle, knocking him into the wall.

  Beloved--behind you!

  Kock! Nunchaku’s weapon landed hard on Alek’s forearm, numbing his arm up and down.

  Nunchaku grinned his blood-slimed, broken-mouthed grin.

  That was enough from this one. Alek turned with a feral snarl, sending Nunchaku back a step with a single look. The boy’s indecision was all he needed. Reaching out, he grabbed the weapon by the chain and forcefully yanked both boy and weapon into the wall behind him to join his companion in a pile.

  Now all that was left was the leader. Alek climbed to his feet. He suddenly felt tired and very cranky. Slayers, punks...all he wanted were a warm bed, a mug of cappuccino with cream and an old book. This was not his definition of a good Friday night. He touched his face, felt the blood there from the shurikens that had found their mark.

  He licked his fingers before he was even aware of what he was doing. And the taste of the blood--dark and bittersweet and hot as cinnamon on his tongue--made the thing within him, that thing that he feared more than any slayer, uncurl and stretch and put its claws into his belly. Pain. A low groan--more of an animal whine than anything human--caught in his throat like a knife. He dropped down on the cement with nearly spasmodic speed, fingers snagged in the bloody cracks, seeking. He licked at the blood on the floor of the alley, sponging it up like a cat. And something in his eyes must have gotten to the leader, because all at one the hood released his hold on the girl and turned to face Alek with his guard completely up.

  The leader had no weapons. He was a street fighter, then. An animal.

  An animal…

  Like me, Alek thought when he realized just what he was doing, how degrading and whorish it all was. He sat back on his heels. Jesus. What the fuck was wrong with him? Where the hell was his training? His discipline? He thought about what he must look like, crouched here amidst the blood, his posture like that of wolves and other large predators, guarding...what? The girl? The fucking blood that had spilt during the battle? Even now the stink of it made him crave like some kind of stupid beast...

  Whimpering, he slammed his fists against the spattering of blood on the cement in front of him, breaking his knuckles, breaking the cement. But the pain was good...the pain made the craving lessen.

&
nbsp; “Fucking stupid banpaia,” the leader said, afraid.

  Alek eyed the youth and waited for him to go in for a hit; instead, he shifted uncertainly. His smell changed from the deep musky man-odor of battle to one of raw, primal animal fear. He met Alek’s eyes evenly, but whatever he saw there was instigating a flight, not a fight, response. As if disgusted by his own cowardice, the youth spat on the concrete. “You want the bitch? She’s yours.”

  Alek watched the boy edge around him. Only when he had cleared Alek’s circumference completely did he go to shake his companions awake. Neither of them looked terribly wounded. A little groggy but otherwise all right. The leader barked some orders to them both in Japanese, something about them getting their lazy asses in the car. After that, as the three hoods started back toward the entrance of the alleyway, the leader turned to face Alek one last time.

  Alek stood up. He didn’t expect another assault, but it never hurt to be prepared.

  Instead of attacking him, the leader only gave him a slit-eyed, sidelong look that said, We’ll have it out another time, shithead, don’t worry. Then all three of them piled into the Caddy, slammed their doors and screeched out of the alley, the car lumbering into traffic like a charging elephant, the leader blaring his horn at a taxi with the right of way.

  Alek waited until he was sure they were gone, and then he waited some more and shivered and felt the last of the craving leave him like a fever burning off. Only then, feeling tired and shaky and very old, did he turn back to the semiconscious woman crouched small against the wall.

  The young one. The one who had solicited him earlier.

  He watched her a moment, waiting until she came around. And he wondered if this was a portent of some kind and what it might mean to him.

  6

  Charlie Wing was smart enough to let things be when he had to. It didn’t happen often. Usually, he could handle anything that came his way, which was the reason Mr. Ashikawa had him in charge of Rich and Xav. They were great fun, the two of them, but they had maybe half a brain between them. On the other hand, Charlie was smart, a survivalist. Not like his father who had been nothing, a big Nothing that drove a garbage truck back in Osaka. He wasn’t his father. He was a warrior. Mr. Ashikawa said so. Now all that was left was to convince Mr. Ashikawa that he’d done the right thing in walking away from a fight.