Slayer: Black Miracles

by Karen Koehler

  He must have said that last aloud. Either that, or his thought-scream had been so loud Michael the mad scientist had heard it. He said, “I told you. Elixir.”

  “Keep that fucking thing away from me!” Brett screamed, scrambling to his feet. But the bed was there and the backs of his knees hit the frame and he collapsed upon it, unable to do much more than stare at the living, pulsing horror in Michael’s hands.

  The creature’s tail curled briefly around one of Michael’s wrists, then let him go. “I assure you: it’s harmless. What will Cherry do to you, Mr. Edelman? Bite you?” Michael snickered.

  “Cherry,” Brett whimpered. And then, “You’re a fucking murderer!”

  “Au contraire. Cherry is still very much alive. In fact, she will live forever.”

  “In a jar.”

  One of Michael’s shoulders lifted in a little shrug. “There are worse places to be.” Then he put the thing back into its jar. The moment he let it go it started to move in an abbreviated swim around the confines of its new home, its bony tail clinking against the glass of the jar, making that sound Brett had heard earlier, that horrible sound. Without another word, Michael lifted the jar and placed it back into its hermetic container, sealing it shut. “At least now her life will be worth something to someone. We will study her for years to come, to see how she grows and changes.” Hiss… and the cap was sealed. “Perhaps one day we will run our cities and computers like this. Perhaps this will be embraced as the new immortality. The new technology. Do you realize what this represents for your world, Mr. Edelman?”

  “You’re motherfucking insane.” Yet he realized how wrong his words were the moment he uttered them. Things like this were not done by insane men. They were done by men who knew exactly what they were doing and how to do it. He sat up on the bed and looked at the door. He might still be able to make it, at least to open the door and cry out for help. Surely someone would hear him and come. A bellboy. The manager. Someone. He only needed to distract Michael long enough to make it out of this den of immortal horrors. “How… how long have you been at this?”

  “Dante and myself? About twenty years. We have quite the menagerie in the Vaults in Rome, I assure you. We collect specimens and send them back to the Cardinal who handles the inventory. But I must admit our research began over a hundred years ago, and that not all of it was very successful. In the Nineteenth Century we were still living in Whitechapel and finding our way. And sometimes making quite the mess. Since then we’ve made a few improvements on the old method. Why, one day we”—a darkness passed across his face when he realized what he had just said—“I may even conclude this experiment and move onto others. I haven’t decided yet.”

  He put one finger to his lips and seemed to ponder something deeply. “That was why we came here to New York in the first place. We wanted to look in on an old field experiment and see how it had faired. But then Dante suggested we collect specimens before we return to Rome and I, being myself, could deny my brother nothing, as infuriatingly impetuous as he was, and agreed to it.” Michael looked up. “Unfortunately, the Slayer got in our way.”

  Brett shook his head helplessly. “The more I learn about you and Dante the more I like that other guy.”

  “The Slayer.” Michael’s face flatlined. He looked at the jars all in a row. The first one clinked again. The other two were silent. “He should be part of the menagerie. We should see how a dhampir’s brain differs from the human and vampire brains we have collected over the years. But somehow or other, I doubt that will ever happen.” He undid one of the other canisters and removed an empty jar full of the black fluid, setting it on the table. “It’s a very delicate operation, you see, requiring complete patience and self-control, and I very much doubt I should be able to control myself around him.”

  Michael looked over at Brett.

  Brett swallowed but his throat was like scorched earth. “Why are you telling me all this?”

  Michael tilted his head. “The scalp is peeled away from the skull, then the back of the skull perforated by a bone drill. The spinal column is left intact, of course. The brain and the great vertebrae are removed as one. The complete operation takes less than an hour if you know what you are doing.”

  “I told you,” Brett said, “I know him… the Slayer. We talked. You touch me, he’ll—”

  “Do nothing,” Michael answered. “He and I have never been friends, but I know him well enough to know he would not associate with one such as yourself. He has better tastes than that. You planned on selling him out to me. But you see”—Michael smiled, a dazzling smile of heartlessly perfect teeth—“he already belongs to me. Like you do.”

  Awash in a sudden sea of unbelievable, mind-numbing fear, Brett more or less threw himself off the bed, landed hard on the floor, hurting his shoulder, but still managing to use the momentum to spring back onto his feet. Then the room blurred all around him as he lunged for the door. One twist and he could scream for help…

  The only trouble was, he had forgotten that Michael had locked the door and that it was one of those hotel locks which required a key to open it. Still he rattled the knob, oblivious to reason, hoping against hope, against the unbelievable odds themselves, that the door would magically spring open. He could see it happening. He could see himself escaping…

  “Mr. Edelman.”

  Letting go of the knob, Brett turned around and threw his back to the door.

  Michael was standing in the same place Brett had left him, at the table where those terrifying silver canoptic jars sat with their menacing presences. But now he had an almost innocuous looking scalpel in his hands. Michael said, “Did you honestly believe you were walking out of here tonight?”

  Brett opened his mouth and screamed for help, his wavering, terrified voice filling the room and making the glass apparatuses rattle. He screamed until the air went out of his lungs. Then he pounded against the locked door, pounded until his arms ached and his body sagged in exhaustion and fear.

  And still Michael stood there, smiling his un-smile. “This room is specifically soundproofed, Mr. Edelman. My brother and I are smarter than that, believe me. And anyway, the people in this building are Coven. This building belongs to Rome.”

  Brett sank down with his back to the door. Suddenly the need to sob was overwhelming. And sob he did. “Leave me alone!” he cried. “Just leave me alone! I don’t want to die!”

  “Mr. Edelman,” Michael said with slitted eyes and a soft, coaxing voice as he approached the crying man, “There is absolutely nothing further from my mind.”

  25

  She watched the Slayer whip the sword around, bringing it to within a hair’s breadth of the neck of the stuffed dummy hanging from the dojo ceiling. The blade virtually sang with power, as if alive in his hands, alive and throbbing with a heartbeat that seemed almost human. He froze momentarily as if he was listening to it.

  Phoenix, standing there, dressed in one of his oversized shirts, felt a jolt of jealousy at the simply and perfect way he had with the sword. Jealous of his grace because she was graceless. Jealous of his beauty because she was not beautiful. But most of all, jealous of the way he controlled his sorrow. It was there inside of him. She could feel it, lodged like a little lead ball in his stomach, slowly killing him. And yet he lived past it. Why couldn’t she be like that? She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. She could barely read the books he had given her. She thought her trip to the cemetery would do something, shake something free, but it only made the sorrow worse. The sadness immortal. If only I could stop feeling, she thought in utter despair. If only I could stop seeing Lilly’s face. If only for an hour, a minute…

  She clenched her fists over the scars in the palms of her hands that were no longer there. She was close to tears and she hated herself for that. But sniffing them back only brought the Slayer’s utterly acute attention around to her.

  He stopped, lowered his sword, and watched her for some moments. Watched her as he had watched her so
often in the club while she danced. Watched her like some placid forest animal. Watched her as if he were silently trying to communicate something to her. Something important. He was the same being she had known then, tall and beautiful and utterly deadly, like some exotic animal, a black and white tiger perhaps. Or a great snake. He was sweated and unkempt from a long hot morning of kata—the sweat was in his long blue-black plaited hair, on his eyelashes like gems—but still a wonder to see.

  She wished she could be like him. No… she wished she were him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “For what?”

  His voice had an odd affect on her. It was sharp and raspy and quiet, like a man who had cried too much in his life and was suffering for it. She stepped into the dojo and gave him back the book. It was Dickens. Hard Times. “I’m letting you down.”

  “You’re not letting me down.”

  “I went to see Lilly yesterday, but it just made it worse,” she said. “I want to be good. A warrior. But there’s so much inside—I can’t Control it. I feel like it’s tearing me apart. I want to hurt him so much. I want… ”

  He reached out and stroked her hair.

  She didn’t want to trust him. She didn’t want to need him. But she did.

  It wasn’t fair! She’d been on her own since she was twelve and no one had ever done shit for her. And now this… and she didn’t know what to do with it. She didn’t know what to say to him. She didn’t know how to show him how much this meant to her. The hard work and the sweat and the blood he gave her and the bruisings he gave her too, because they were making her what she wanted—needed—to be. They were forging her. Like a sword. Like a warrior.

  She didn’t understand why he cared so much. She didn’t understand why she did.

  She leaned into him and buried her face against his shoulder so he would not have to see her tears and her loss of Control.

  He held her and rocked her and said meaningless little beautiful things to her. She shook like someone wracked by a deadly fever, wracked and wanting and utterly destroyed. And then suddenly she was up in his arms and she clung to him and he was lowering her gently to the mat beneath them. She lay there, blinking up at him, mystified by his actions. But not afraid. She trusted him. She did. He knelt over her, only watching her with his great breathless silence, his eyes tracing the pathway of her tears as if he meant to take them from her.

  “I haven’t cried in years,” he said with some regret.

  “I’ll cry for you,” she said. It seemed all she was good at doing these days. Where was the girl who could fight anyone? The girl able to claw at attackers, to spit at the feet of punks? Where was Irena who protected and provided for Lilly? Irena was dead. As dead as Lilly. They were buried together.

  The never-ending well of grief threatened to overwhelm her again. She turned aside her head so as to keep him from seeing.

  He leaned down and kissed the corner of her eye and drank the tears off her face. His touch was like a brush of velvet. His mouth and his hands where they fell upon her soothed her like an elixir. A balm. Not just her bruised and aching body, but her soul as well. As if he were singing a lullaby to her in some strange old language she had never heard before yet knew instinctively. Telling her it was all right. That she was safe and valuable to him. She sighed and turned her head and blinked up at him. She felt the gift of his kiss like the brush of moth wings on her mouth, not sexual, not even sensual, but loving. Cherishing.

  Phoenix smiled through her tears. “What did you do? You didn’t take—?”

  “Your pain? I won’t do that. You need your pain. One day you’ll see that.”

  He dropped kisses on her face, and with each one an insurmountable weight seemed to lift. The pain and anger were still there—how could she ever forget how she had let Lilly die?—but now the mindless rage that made her want to tear down the walls around her had gone, leaving in its wake only a lurid and conniving sorrow, like a hole through her heart. It still hurt. It hurt so bad. But now she realized she would one day be able to live with it. She would survive it.

  She would survive her sadness like he survived his.

  He sat back on his heels.

  But the distance between them brought the crushing weight of misery back so quickly that Phoenix felt she would never move again. She would simply lie here for all eternity while the pain ate her alive. “Please,” she said. She hated herself. She covered her face. “I can’t bear this anymore.”

  He considered that. Something passed across his face. A decision.

  He crouched over her again, pulled loose his flood of inky hair, this time covering her with his body and hair and strength. She felt a faint stirring of fear and licked her lips nervously, but his bare skin touched hers and again alighted the odd feeling of weightlessness in her. His hair fell in loops across her cheeks and throat and she turned her face to feel its soft scented weight drift across her mouth. “Lie still,” he whispered wetly into her ear. She did. He kissed her again, a deeper, tongue-rasping kiss, and she tasted blood from where his sharp eyeteeth pricked her lower lip. He narrowed his eyes. They seemed darker somehow, more feral. Primitive.

  Her heart tripped. Something inside told her what that meant.

  “Will it hurt?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  He closed his eyes. “But you must be certain. I can’t… undo this once it’s done. I’ll be a part of you forever. Even after I’m gone you will carry my blood with you even as I carry the blood of my master within me.”

  She touched his hair, kissed his mouth reverently. There was sex and sensuality in the kiss, but it was more than that. It was like a communion of sorts. He kissed back, slowly, as if savoring her. “My Master… ” The words did not seem silly and did not embarrass her to say them.

  He kissed her once more, but now the touch of his mouth was more aggressive and taking. It took all of her Control to keep from pushing him back. She’d never liked a male’s touch before. Too many times in JV halls, and sometimes in foster homes, some man had stood too close to her and tried taking her against her will. She had never been with a man before. They were too frightening, demanded too much of you, like vampires trying to steal your soul so they could wound it and make it bleed. They made you feel small and helpless and afraid. She whimpered, but to her surprise, he didn’t yank at her clothing or pinch or bruise her flesh like the men she had known before. The men who had wanted her and tried to hurt her. He did not hit her when she panicked and put her hands to his chest and pushed him away. He was not like them, she reminded herself. Not a man. He was one of her own. He sat back and waited. She relaxed and opened herself to him again, welcoming him, and tried to enjoy the comforting warmth his touch brought to the surface of her skin. She touched his great black mane of hair, then held his head against the side of her throat and felt the press of his kiss there. His teeth.

  He hesitated and she tipped her head back, inviting him to take.

  “I’ll harm you there,” he said and slowly began to unbutton her shirt. She should have panicked, but instead she only lay still, watching him attend to her. He took such care, touching her with such reverence. The air was cool against her bare skin, his touch cooler still. He ran the back of one finger down her throat, from the scar she had there to the valley between her beasts, then circled the nipple of her left breast, bringing a flush of color to all her white skin. He kissed her there and she felt his rough tongue dampen the tip, then his teeth close around it as he suckled her.

  He tried to be gentle, but it still hurt as he said it would. The press of his teeth against her flesh brought a shiver of fright to her skin. She arched involuntarily, and only the force of his hands kept her back to the floor. The pain was like a knife in her heart, a knife to which her entire body responded. And then it was done and the sweat was on her skin from the pain and he was there, sponging blood from the wound with his tongue and she wondered if this was what it had been like on
the night Bellerophone had taken her, her back to the rough stone wall of a stinking and lonely dead end space as he killed her, and wished she could remember it all more clearly. No, she thought as she felt the smallest bit of herself leak out through the tiny wounds he had made, the wounds he nursed at, it could not have been like this. Not for her. Not for Lilly. Lilly. Her Lilly…

  Her body screamed with the rage. For herself. For the dead who came back and for those who did not. She felt her whole body contract with the rage. She heard it echo inside her head and out. She heard her voice, a hoarse roar that turned her throat to sand and made her vision blur and run like rain. He was there again, her murderer, his bulk holding her down as he fed from her in the back of that reeking back alley, and she pounded helplessly against him with her fists, pounded and screamed and clawed like a cat, pouring her rage into him, making him eat that too along with her blood and her soul. Making him suffer even as she suffered…

  “Phoenix.”

  Her vision ran clear and she saw him above her, her master, the Slayer, and stopped striking his back with her fists. His eyes were halved and bleeding over with tears. Red tears. Her pain and he was shedding it for her. She saw with wonder that a single lock of his black hair had turned white from root to tip, white like a witch’s streak.

  He bowed his head and wept, shivering, each tear wrung from his body like a labor, those tears falling upon her skin like rain. Her pain, her blood. And her skin absorbed it all. But now the rage was silent. She felt exhausted, inside and out, drained to the dregs of her soul. She touched the mark on her breast, his mark, smaller than the one Bellerophone had tattooed across her throat yet somehow more powerful than his had been, but there was little pain there now. It was all used up.

  The Master sniffed and wiped the blood off of his face.

  She touched his white lock. He was just beautiful. Her Master.

  And she loved him. Loved him as she had loved Lilly. But it was a different love.