“Don’t be stupid,” Alek whispered through the blood on his mouth.
“Carfax is the bloody stupid one if he thinks he’ll ever get away with this!” Michael said, eyeing the enemy like a frenzied animal caught in bloodlust. “Where are you going to go?” he asked Carfax. “Where are you going to hide?”
Honestly, he did not know. But he could not think about that right now. Right now, the important thing was to get out of this deathtrap. Once they were outside, out in the night where Carfax could breathe and think straight, he would think about what to do.
Alek said, “Michael is right, Carfax. Where are you going to run with a bounty on your head? And after this”—he indicated the bloody shambles of the club—“who is going to take you in? Certainly no hive in New York.”
Again Carfax surveyed the room. It wasn’t all that bad. They were his people. His thralls. His patrons. They had died for their leader. The humans asked their people to die for so much less, to die for vanity’s sake, for pride. Yet the moment he caught a glimpse of Akisha standing in the doorway of the club, Akisha the only member of his former hive still alive, he found himself frozen by the hate in her eyes. The blame.
I did it for you, my mate, he told her through the special link they shared as blood-bonded mates.
You did it for you, she told him. And you did it for that Elixir…
Alek turned to Akisha as if he had heard their exchange. But that was ridiculous. They were not mates and he could not have heard her thoughts, unless he was utilizing some form of empathy so powerful it dwarfed even his power. And then he realized what Alek was doing. He was not listening to her. He was asking her permission to kill her mate. He was instigating an ancient law. As a slayer, he could kill any marked vampire. But as a vampire, or rather, as part of the community of vampires, he could do no such thing except with her permission.
Akisha nodded to Alek.
“No, you can’t… it is forbidden except to those of our circle, Akisha!” Carfax told her.
Akisha looked at him and through him. “Alek is of our circle, my mate, and he wants to challenge you to this hive. What is your answer?”
Dante made a strangling sound in his throat. Michael practically rushed headlong at them both. Alek, however, intervened yet again, pressing both hands against Michael’s chest and pushing him forcefully back, almost into the wall. Michael looked appalled but said nothing to the younger slayer.
“Akisha is right,” Alek whispered. He handed Akisha his sword and coat, then turned to face Carfax, unarmed to show his intentions. “It’s my right as a student of Akisha to challenge your right to the hive.” Alek folded his hands in front of him in the typical Shao-Lin stance of peace, the one Akisha had taught him all those years earlier when she had instructed him for a short time. “If you lose, you die by my hand. If you win, you die by the hand of the slayers. And if you leave without fighting, no hive in the world will ever accept you again. You will be hunted by your people until the end of your days.”
Carfax snorted. “So you give me no escape at all.”
“No… no escape. But if you fight me, I promise not to make you suffer in death.”
“How gallant! Should I thank you?” Carfax pulled Dante up tighter and began to move sideways through the crush of bodies on the floor, toward the door. “No… I don’t think so. I think I shall take my chances out in the world.”
Alek dropped his hands. Carfax smelled the steel in them before he saw the throwing daggers in his sleeves flash. And then the blade was in Dante—Dante of all people!—and Dante was folding under Carfax’s hold and there was nothing left for Carfax to do but drop him and take to the door like a bat out of hell itself—
20
—except that Carfax never made it to the door. Using the second throwing dagger he carried in his opposing sleeve, Alek literally nailed Carfax to the broken plaster wall beside the door: the eight-inch blade, as slender as a tool yet as powerful as any of the weapons Amadeus had ever trained him to use, sank into Carfax’s back. It did two things at once: it stopped Carfax, sealing him to the wall, and it severed his spinal column below the waist. Carfax screamed and scrabbled at the wall with his long painted fingernails, but it was a scream of rage and frustration, not pain. He could feel nothing below the waist.
The vampire’s wails were the only sounds in the funeral silence of the club. The only sounds, other than the whimpers of the not-quite-yet-dead thralls and the quiet, panicked sounds of Michael going to his brother and holding him as he examined the knife that protruded from Dante’s chest just above the heart.
“You… you!” Michael spat, but Alek turned away and moved swiftly to the door and to Carfax.
Carfax was helpless. A moderately sized man of moderately good looks, very European and infinitely proper. Now he simply looked like an insect smashed against a wall. Now he struggled like any animal stuck in a trap. As Alek approached him, Carfax sensed his doom and tossed back his head. “Don’t let them take my Elixir! Don’t let Rome have it!” he screeched through his teeth. Hair flying, body straining like a violin bow on the verge of snapping, he actually found the strength to pull himself from the wall, and, with a howl of feral anguish, turned on Alek one last time.
But Alek had gotten his sword back from Akisha before he approached the hivemaster. Carfax more or less turned right into it. Alek simply finished the process.
Akisha dropped where she stood, riveted to the floor by the sudden agony of her broken blood bond. Alek sheathed his sword and went to her and lifted her into his arms, taking her seemingly frail body back into the office so she could lie and recover upon the divan.
Her eyes fluttered open when he touched her hair.
“I need you,” Alek began, “I need you to not tell anyone about tonight.”
“That you… you killed Carfax…”
He nodded. She knew as well as he that by killing Carfax and by being a student of the hive Queen, he had the right—no, the duty—to claim himself as hivemaster and Akisha’s new mate and master. And she knew as well as he did that as a slayer he could not perform such a duty. Not now. Not ever.
Yet she was hopeful, nonetheless. “Alek… won’t you consider…?”
“No. I’m sorry.”
“Perhaps… one day… ”
He kissed her mouth to silence her. “Tell your people Carfax was murdered by an enemy. Empirius. One of the other hivemasters. I don’t care. Dante and Michael will have another story to tell, but the vampires won’t believe a couple of insane slayers. ”
He held her hopeful eyes a moment more. Then he went out into the battlefield again.
Don’t let them take my Elixir! Don’t let Rome have it!
He thought about the former hivemaster’s words as he returned to Michael and Dante. He was curious enough to ask Michael what Carfax had meant, but one look from Michael shut him up at once.
“You son of a whore!” Michael snarled. “Look what you did!” With extreme precision, Michael managed to withdraw the switchblade from his brother’s chest. Dante’s body jumped at the last moment as the blade was freed from the sucking red cavity. Then Michael sliced his own wrist open with the blade and drizzled blood into his brother’s open wound. All the while his eyes followed Alek around the room. Dante was bleeding, but not badly, and Michael’s blood would certainly accelerate the healing. Alek had studied enough anatomy, vampire, dhampir and otherwise, and had practiced enough with the throwing daggers to know precisely how and where to toss them.
He had never posed a threat to Dante. Not a real one.
“He’s not hurt badly. He’ll recover,” Alek said, annoyed and afraid of the anger pouring out of the always-placid Michael.
“You could have killed him, you stupid cunt!”
“But I didn’t.”
Michael glared at him, his brother’s head cradled in his hands. “Leave now. I don’t want to look at you again.”
Alek buttoned his coat. “Fine. You clean up the mess h
ere. I did my part.” Breaking the heated eye contact with Michael, Alek picked through the bodies and headed for the door. But just as he reached the vestibule of the converted church, Michael’s voice came to him again, drifting out of the steaming meat locker the club had become:
“If you ever endanger my brother’s life again, I will hunt you down, whelp, and I will tear your heart beating from your chest!”
Alek ignored the threat and went out into the night.
Nothing very much did come of that night, all told. Akisha kept her promise and claimed the vampire Empirius slew her former mate. Michael and Dante either never spoke of it at all or were not believed, because the story stuck. Empirius, very much enjoying his sudden fame, settled a new hive in the Abyssus with Akisha. Rome and the Coven were satisfied if a bit surprised by the sudden decimation of Carfax’s hive. And the twins went back to Europe to continue their experiments.
Alek never discovered what the “Elixir” was that Carfax didn’t want Rome having. And he never saw the twins again until two nights ago. That night he got a lead on the serial murderer the papers were calling The Ladykiller—a roaming psychopath that was doing a Jolly Jack routine with a scalpel on the Lower East Side working girls. That was when he discovered the identity of the murderer as Dante. And that was when the whole mess suddenly turned personal.
21
It had been hard getting J. Stephan Paul’s Manhattan address since Paul had not joined Horror Writers of America and wasn’t listed in their directory. And since Alek could not very well get to him through his publisher, the whole affair caused quite a challenge. Undaunted, Alek called the one person in the city he knew would have the information he required.
Edward Ashikawa picked up on the third ring. Alek was surprised the number Edward had given him the last time they parted company was his personal cell number. “Yes, what can I do for you, dhampir?” the man said in his soft, almost hissing voice. There was no trace of an accent. As Alek paced across the library, his cell phone cradled in his neck, he sharpened his katana on a whetstone and wondered how Edward knew it was him—whether Alek was the only one who had this number, or if Edward was using some odd ability gained from the unnatural mixing of his blood with that of his vampires. Perhaps someone else might find it amusing to speak to the Dragon Lord of the New York City Yakuza, but Alek just wanted it over as soon as possible. Edward was a dangerous man and simply knew too much about everything.
“I thought… an exchange of information,” Alek said.
“Ah. And here I thought you would be calling down a favor.”
“And be in your debt? I don’t think so, Edward.”
“You play at honor, but you know nothing about it.”
Nice line from Kung Fu or something, thought Alek. He was being cynical, but Edward always brought out the cynic in him. It had something to do with the fact that Edward was convinced Alek was an unlearned cretin and his perfect servant and would one day serve the Yakuza on his knees, not unlike Alek’s recent nemesis Kage. But biting back the argument already taking form in his mouth, he said, “I have news that the Tong are moving 750 kilos on the Wharf.”
“You know,” said Edward, “I could pretend to know all this already and simply give you the information you require. Then you would be in my debt.”
“But that wouldn’t be honorable, Dragon.”
“Perhaps you assume too much of me, Slayer.”
Alek harrumphed.
“When are they moving?” Edward asked.
“In 72 hours, according to Jean Paul.”
“Your other contact,” Edward mused. “Seems you have one for one side of your nature and one for the other.”
Alek ignored the jive and said, “I need information you probably have.”
“Go ahead.”
Ten minutes later, with the address written on a piece of paper in his hand and his coat slung over his shoulder—a stylish woolen one, for it was a brisk autumn day—Alek stepped into the dojo where Phoenix was practicing a combination of dance steps and war moves at the bar. She never stopped. Never quit. Not even to eat or drink.
But the moment she saw him she did stop, gliding gracefully to a dead halt. He had to admit she was incredible. Probably better than he was. Her clothing was soaked through with her sweat, her hair clinging like red vines to her white porcelain face. She looked on the brink of physical exhaustion and collapse.
“Are we going to the cemetery?” she asked, looking at his semi-formal clothing and coat.
“No. I have an errand to run. I want you to rest now.”
“I want to go with you.”
“No.”
She scarcely seemed to move. And then suddenly she was in the air, striking at him with a sidekick, her voice a roar that made the mirrored walls at the bar shake as if with a storm.
Alek waited until she was practically upon him. Then he casually stepped aside and clotheslined her in the stomach. The impact arrested her momentum and made her crash to the floor in a sweating, trembling bundle. She recovered quickly, but the moment was lost, and instead of retaliating, she pushed herself to her knees and simply looked up at him, trembling with the mindless, clawing, seething anger going on inside of her.
“Lesson number four. Never attack in anger,” he said. “It is not an ally but a liability.”
“Fuck you,” she whispered and kicked at his legs.
He minced backward to avoid the impact, put on his day shades, and went out into the hall.
“I’m going,” she cried after him, standing in the doorway of the dojo. A threat. “I’m going and you can’t stop me! I hate you, Alek, I hate you…!”
I hate you, Alek, I hate you to hell! Debra’s words, once, spoken in childlike anger. Alek glanced aside at the mirror in the foyer but it was empty except for his own image.
Empty, he thought, like everything else in my life. When does the sorrow die?
22
An hour later he was on the penthouse balcony of one of the most exclusive skyscrapers in the city. The upper floor was dedicated to a members-only lodge called the Overlook Café, created for some of the most powerful men in the city. Bankers, Restaurateurs. And yes, authors. Alek had lived his entire life in New York City, and yet this was not the kind of exclusive club that he was familiar with. This was a club where the forbidden fruits were slightly more mundane: high-stakes gambling, high-end whores and five hundred dollar lunch platters. The maître ‘d of the revolving glass-domed dining area received him graciously even if he was a bit annoyed by Alek’s overall presence and appearance. Alek thought it must be the black clothes and long hair, though he counted no less than three well-known heavy metal musicians sitting at tables in the dining area. No, then, it had to be because Edward had announced him.
“Mr. Paul is expecting you,” the man, who looked like some kind of Hammer-studios version of Count Dracula, said. Taking up a leather-bound menu, he led Alek around the perimeter of the dome to the back where a set of silk screens hid a small private section of the dining room from the rest of the diners. And there was J. Stephan Paul in a tailored Armani suit, sitting at a private table adorned with a white silk tablecloth and eating a steak the size of a small laptop computer.
Alek sat down in the chair across from him but did not remove his sunglasses. It was terribly impolite, he knew, and his strict European upbringing balked at the notion of sitting in a dining room behind a pair of shades, but the glass dome made the room so bright that even the little light leaking in around the rim of the glasses made him wince. Taking them off would make him effectively blind.
Alek waited to see if a busboy or a waiter would appear. None did. “Good afternoon, Mr. Paul,” he said.
“I don’t give interviews anymore, young man,” Paul said as he forked more mutilated cow into his mouth. The effect was… well, unnerving. Alek was reminded of an animal at a trough. He tried to envision this man writing scandalous erotic romances, then stopped himself before he lost his lunch complet
ely. The thought was almost as revolting as the overcooked animal he was feasting on. Paul looked up. “I told Ed that but he insisted I meet with you anyway.”
“I’m not a reporter.”
For a moment Paul simply sat there, staring at Alek with a kind of blinking, myopic interest. Alek could read nothing from the man other than an undercurrent of surprise. J. Stephan Paul had such a negative presence in the room it made Alek want to focus his thoughts elsewhere. The part of him that was Debra seemed momentarily taken aback, as if she neither liked nor trusted Paul. Alek only hoped Paul would not prove her correct. He would hate to think he sold out all those Tong punks to Edward for nothing that was worth saving.
“No,” said Paul. “You’re not.” He put his fork down with a clink. “How do you know Ed?”
“We had some business a while back.”
“Funny. I’ve never seen you in the club.” Paul glanced around the domed dining area as if to emphasize his point.
“This isn’t really my scene.”
“I understand.”
Alek didn’t like the sound of that. Best to get things back on track. “I’ve come on a matter of extreme importance, Mr. Paul. I’m here to warn you about your publisher, Mr. Brett Edelman.”
“Brett?” Paul took a long noisy sip of his café au lait.
“Yes, Mr. Paul. It’s come to my attention that he means to do you some harm.”
Paul sat back in his chair. “Does he?”
“You suspect him?”
“I’ve always suspected Brett.”
Slayer: Black Miracles Page 24
