Alek looked past the child to his father. “I’ve been fighting the bad guys.”
“Cool.” Danny finally let go long enough to study his face. “Where’s your mask?”
Alek tilted his head. “No masks for you, Danny-boy.”
“I missed you, Uncle Alek,” the boy said and gave him another squeeze. “I was scared, but Daddy said you would be back. Daddy was right.”
Alek smiled. “I missed you too.”
“Danny,” said Edward Ashikawa, patiently, “Why don’t you go inside so Uncle Alek and I can talk?”
Danny stared up at his father. “Have to?”
“I would wish it, son.”
Danny made a face. “Grown-up talk?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Yuck.” He turned back to Alek and grabbed a hold of his arm, shaking it emphatically. “Can I show you the dojo later?” Again he glanced at his father. “Daddy gave me a sword. I can’t lift it though. Will you help me? It’s cool but not like yours. Daddy says you have the coolest sword ever.”
“Sure.”
“Will you show me your sword? I want to hold it.”
“Of course,” Alek said. “Now listen to your father and go inside. Okay?”
“’Kay.” Grinning, the boy ran off. But at the door of the house he turned and waved frantically one more time.
Alek waved back and the boy ran off.
“Kage was right...Danny loves you,” Edward said.
“Where is Kage?” Alek sat down on the stairs of the gazebo.
“Around.”
Alek nodded. “You lost him when you sent him to protect Danny.”
Ashikawa sipped his tea. “Yes. But I did gain you, didn’t I?”
Alek smirked. “I’m not a vampire, Mr. Ashikawa. I don’t serve.”
“All your kind serve,” Ashikawa answered with a mirrored smirk. “It is your nature to do so. And you cannot deny your nature, now can you? Nor more than Kage can. No more than I can.”
Alek shook his head. “I was passing by the house and wanted to know how Danny was. He had an experience last week.”
“Danny is well. Danny is with Kage. That’s all that’s important to me. I have everything I need, you see.” Ashikawa hesitated and glanced sidelong at Alek. “Well...nearly so.”
Alek stood up as the power of the Dragon seemed to reach for him, to push at him, to keep him sitting on the stairs. At Edward’s feet. “You never give up, do you?” Alek said. The anger kindled a fire from within. He would have to leave soon or chance going a second round with the Dragon Lord of the Yakuza, something he didn’t want, not when he was on an important mission today. He buttoned up his coat. “You won’t win, Mr. Ashikawa. I won’t belong to you. Ever.”
But Edward Ashikawa never lost his smile. “Time passes, Slayer,” he said, “and time changes all things.”
31
He stepped into the hospital lobby just before the end of visiting hours. The receptionist looked up at him with a bored expression that changed dramatically when she got a good look at him. He waited for some snide commend from Debra, but none was forthcoming surprisingly, so he approached the young woman and asked which room Candace Katherine Keith was in.
“1141, sir, but her visitor list is highly-restricted. May I have your name?”
He gave it, wondering if Kat’s family, or Kat herself, had thought to include him on the list. He was mildly surprised to learn she had. He made his way to her room, ignoring the interest of the receptionist. He pushed open her door, expecting to find her in a sad, vacant room, but the room was not like that. It was a veritable garden of delights, flowers and gifts everywhere he looked. Like the grand finale of a stage play, he thought. Like a funeral.
She has changed, he thought. And it had been no more than a week. Her skin was brown and dry, and she had lost so much weight it hung slack on her bones. Her muscle tone and strength were gone. How much weight had she lost in only one week? Twenty pounds? More? He had no way of telling, but he could see the terrible toll it had taken on her body. Even her hair looked lifeless, draped in dry, brittle strands across the pillow, all the curl gone, as if that were too much effort for her body to make.
It took him a moment to recognize the emotion welling up within him. Rage. He no longer wondered why he had loved her once so long ago. She had been worth loving. But this was sacrilege.
His rage gave him power and he cried out silently, trying to touch Kandy Kat’s mind. His hand stroked hers, and then moved to smooth her cheek between the tangles of the tubes and machines that kept her alive these days. He might even have kissed her since princes were reputedly able to bring back fair sickly maidens with such kisses, but the machines would not allow that. And anyway, everything he touched, everything he loved, died.
Kat opened her eyes. They were still bright. They still held mirth.
“Hi there,” she whispered. “I saw you...at the exhibit...so beautiful...”
“You shouldn’t try to talk too much,” Alek told her as he took the chair by her bed.
“Don’t tell me...what to do.”
He smiled sadly.
She returned the smile with one just as sad. And then her smile was wiped away by curiosity. She shook her head. “Can’t be...must be...Alek’s son? Are you?”
Alek tilted his head.
“Are you?” she repeated in earnest.
He thought about it. It would be so easy to lie now, to tell Kandy Kat that that was true, that Alek was gone and he was the son she had never known existed in this world. But somehow...he just didn’t want to. The hour was getting late. Lies would gain him nothing.
“It’s me, Kat,” he said. “Serpent Boy.”
“Can’t...” Again a shake of her head. Her hand went up, her skinny hand, and touched his face, a face that had not aged a single day since his thirty-third birthday. The thought send a shard of anger so deep through his heart he thought it should stop beating immediately. Immortality for him, but none for her. In some evil twist of fate, the gods had seen fit to take a bit of brilliance like Kat and leave a worthless shadow behind.
It wasn’t fair. And the unfairness gave him strength through the anger and he began to speak, and he talked about the night of the senior prom and how Kat’s blue dress had caught on the door of his Thunderbird--that 1958 great white shark she loved so much--and how they had gone to a dress-fitters up in Ithaca, the only one they could find at that late hour, to mend the tear. And while there, the dress-fitter, feeling sorry for Kat’s plight, had given her a whiskey sour with a cherry, and Kat broke her front tooth on the pit of the cherry and he talked about how, by the time they were done at the dentist, the prom was half over and how they chose to drive out to an overlook near the Hudson and how Kat wasn’t angry and how Alek said he felt like Lil' Abner and how things like this always seemed to happen to him and would she forgive him? And she kissed him, though carefully with that swollen mouth of hers, and told him she wished she could spend the rest of their lives together like this. That everything was perfect, the night and the full moon, and so was he, and would he make love to her tonight? She was ready, so ready, and happy to have waited for him.
And by the time he had completed the story, Kat had fallen asleep.
He held her hand and watched her and thought about all that he had lost and all he would never get back, and after a half hour--fifteen minutes or so past visiting hours, yet no one came to get him--Kat opened her eyes again. “Alek,” she whispered. “Why didn’t you?”
“I couldn’t,” he answered.
“Because...of this?” Again she touched his face.
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
He thought about that. “Something I have to live with for a very long time.”
“Tell me about it?”
He nodded. And he did. And he told other stories. He talked about the night and what it was like to see in it with eyes unlike those of others. He talked about history and what role his peo
ple had played in it. He talked about growing up different from other boys and not understanding why. He talked about the craving and how he lived with it and how it kept him apart from everyone else.
Kat turned her head and closed her eyes.
Time passed, how much he did not know. Time suddenly meant very little.
She was awake.
“My mouth is so dry.” Kat looked at the beside table, unwilling to ask for any help. Alek set her hand down and reached for the Styrofoam pitcher and the plastic glass with the bent straw. He helped Kat drink, his eyes burning with unshed tears. He wondered why a husband was not here. He wondered where her children were. He wondered at last where all the fans were, the ones who had given her these gifts. He wondered how anyone could be loved and then abandoned so. And maybe the two of them had touched on some deeper level at last, because Kat said, in time, “Tired of lies, Serpent Boy. All of them...all the fans, the fame-givers...why aren’t they here? I’m so scared and they’re not even here to say goodbye. I don’t want to die.”
Alek moved to the head of the bed and gently cradled the crying woman. He shivered at the touch of her. Her first breath left him sick to his stomach; the smell was prolonged death, a fetid miasma of decaying flesh. Alek lifted the birdlike weight against his shoulder, careful of the needles and tubes. He wanted so much to help, to end this.
“You’re not alone now,” he said.
Kat didn’t have much to say. She spoke in frantic spurts, wandering somewhere between the pain and the medicine, the past and the present. Her life, her loves, the children she wished she had had. She even laughed once when she talked about how she had almost gotten married some time after Alek left her.
Then she slept and Alek waited.
It took a long time. Near morning she opened her eyes again, for the last time. She was painfully lucid. Before she died she said, “What does it feel like?” Then the room turned cold and Alek realized Kat had gone elsewhere.
He sat for a long time, still holding her.
She had gone elsewhere because this world never deserved her. And because his world could not endure such a light. She had not belonged to him anymore than Robyn had belonged to Edward. Like Edward, like Kage, he did not belong to anyone. He was trembling when he gently laid the body out straight. He closed Kat’s eyes and smoothed her hair and straightened her gown before he got up and prepared to leave.
What does it feel like?
He told the truth.
“Alone,” he said.
The End
Slayer:
Immortal
By Karen Koehler
1
All of his life, Brett Edelman had wanted to be immortal. He doubted it was an old wish, or a very unusual one. Didn’t everyone want to live forever, in one state or another? Immortal in memory, immortal in words, immortal in deeds, good or bad. Yes, he was sure everyone, from king to peasant, from rich man to poor, wanted that. Straight or gay, black or white, dreamer or fatalist—everyone wanted that. Why would they not?
Immortal.
He thought about that word and what it mean even as he lay in Heaven, the loft area of Club Bauhaus, and coupled with Nadine. Nadine, a sweet little bitch, was his usual. Oh he would take others on occasion, but seldom with the ferocity he had for Nadine. Nadine was his. Well, not his, really. Nadine belonged to the Master of the Hive, Jean Paul. They all did. If he so much as breathed a word of possession Nadine’s way or suggested in any way that she leave Club Bauhaus, Jean Paul would have a fit and demand he leave and never return. Really, Jean Paul, being what he was, might do worse that that.
He had seen Jean Paul do things that didn’t even deserve imagining. He knew, downstairs, there was a Members Only room that catered to Jean Paul and his thralls’ more eclectic tastes. No human had ever been there. It was reputed to be the most spectacular place in the world by those in the inner circle. A place where pain transcended pleasure and became something altogether different. Paradise. Hell. Brett didn’t care which. At times like this, draped over the raven-haired, emerald-eyed beastly beauty Nadine as he was, the only thought he had was what it would be like to be a Member of Jean Paul’s clan.
To be Immortal.
Holding that thought, Brett nearly swooned in the throes of the bloodletting. That Nadine had deigned to feed on him tonight only elevated the thrill. Nothing he had ever tried with anyone else had ever had the power of Nadine’s bloody kisses. Softly he felt her delicate breath on his neck, felt the astonishing terror of being held captive to a natural predator—the pain and relief of surrender to a power greater than his own, so rare in this city where he was all but king in his own way—and the wet, exquisite demand of her mouth, her endless mouth. Endless hunger.
Endless… immortal.
He had never understood what the word swoon meant until he darkened the doorway of Club Bauhaus. He had done so about a year ago, when he and a small group of businessmen decided to see what went down in the seediest and most popular club in the Lower East Side. They had sat at round tacky-topped tables and watched the human girls dance and throw off the silk handkerchiefs that passed for clothing. The guys he was with had catcalled as they sank an endless stream of greenbacks into bras and g-strings and called themselves daring. Even now, if he turned his head just right, he could catch a glimpse through the one-way glass wall of the loft at the naïve newcomers to the club sitting down there, their eyes glued to the redhead on the runway, thinking they were the most adventurous fools who ever lived. But he didn’t want to turn his head.
Later he would suffer a tingling all-over headache from the blood loss. That and a nagging, exciting sensation of shame. What they did, after all, they did on a divan in the middle of a crimson pit of smoke and lust and there was nothing but a few feet and the haze of the cigarette and clove smoke and incense of Heaven to separating them from the next couple. But for now it was beautiful. It felt beautiful. There was something scientific about it, he’d learned. Something about the high that results from the loss of blood and the odd alchemy of the vampire’s venom mingling with his human blood. But for now, he found he couldn’t care less. For now it was only about the feeling. Only about being immortal.
Was this what it was like? Was this feeling what they felt every day of their unending lives, these beautiful beings? Many times he had wanted to ask such questions of Nadine. What she was and what it meant to her. But in the end he always held off, afraid of the truth. Afraid that if he knew too much about them—about the vampires of Club Bauhaus—he would spoil the fantasy. And this was his fantasy. His world away from the world of work and wife and kids and everything that pulled him down into dull, oppressive normality.
This was… immortal. And for the few short hours a week that Brett Edelman got to savor it, he called it his hidden treasure.
2
I’ll make you immortal,” the guy was saying.
Irena Sullivan snubbed out her cigarette and checked the clock on the wall of the employees’ lounge. Ten to nine. She had some time. She looked around. The lounge was a little makeshift room at the back of JP’s club. There was a couple of folding tables, a vending machine, and a coffee pot she depended on for her life. Jean Paul didn’t usually allow anyone in the back of the club, but somehow or other, this fool who thought he was a producer had gotten through.
And he was starting to piss her off.
Her face and hands felt hot and throbbing but she told herself to have control.
Control.
The guy was wearing some kind of outdated John Travolta-inspired lounge lizard suit frumped up for the new millennium. His badly dyed blonde hair was blow-dried and his shirt was open almost to his navel where a legion of chains jangled amidst what looked like black wolf hair growing wild on his chest. He smelled like a French whorehouse, as if he’d been swimming in cologne. But Irena could still smell the cheapness on him underneath it all. The pimp cheapness. She’d grown up around these types, after all. Vampires, every last one.
Looking to prey on her kind of desperation.
“Serious acting?” Irena asked, eyebrows raised as she used her teeth to pluck loose a new cigarette from the pack.
Mr. Pimp lit it for her with a monogrammed silver lighter.
“That’s all I employ, sweetness. Serious actresses.”
But Irena knew serious acting for strippers usually involved arriving on a set at three in the morning only to be tied down in various unlikely angles for hours at a time while your muscles grew sore and the set director pumped you full of heroine to keep you going through a fourteen-hour filming shift. That was what Bess said, anyway, Irena’s best friend in all the world. Bess had worked in films on the side, usually in the winter months when dancing didn’t pay as well as it should. Not that JP didn’t pay his girls well, but some of them had expensive habits and the tips they got nightly helped in a big way. And when those tips weren’t there, well…
The though of money depressed Irena. How did that old joke go? Honey, our money problems are over. We’re out of money. She sucked back on the cigarette, kicking herself mentally because she smoked too much and drank too much and she was using up too much of their money of late. If she kept this up, she wouldn’t be able to afford school clothes for Lilly next fall. She had to be sensible. And she did try, she really did, but somehow or other, things always seemed to get away from her.
Lack of Control.
It had always been like that for her, for as long as she could remember. Even as a little girl she could never eat or drink enough, not that she had ever suffered the consequences of such indulgences. If she had, this guy would not even be considering her for the job. But the more she indulged the more she needed. She was a skeleton, and even JP had begun to eye her suspiciously, probably thinking her habits were sucking the life out of her. But no matter how much she consumed in food, wine, beer, drugs, or tobacco, none of it made any change in her. And nothing made her happy. She’d tried it all at one point or another, and sometimes all at once, but there seemed no point to it anymore; the drugs had no affect on her. The liquor was wasted. The tobacco only made her crave.
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