Slayer: Black Miracles

by Karen Koehler

  Michael laughed. “You know I can’t fight you or your enchanted sword.”

  “You don’t… have to fight me… and the sword… just me.” Alek narrowed his eyes to mere slits and waited for the pain to subside to a low scream. Then he said as he recovered, “You and me. No weapons. No cuffs and chains. Just the two of us. Man to man.” He rattled the titanium chains. “Even Dante chose to fight me squarely.”

  “My brother was a fool.”

  “Dante at least had his pride.”

  Michael lowered the scalpel to make the first incision.

  “No taste for real bloodshed, Michael? For war?” Alek asked. “You just want to carve me up like every other victim? That’s not very sporting.”

  Michael hesitated and showed Alek his teeth in a grimace. “You are not sport, old boy,” he said, his breathy meaty as he leaned in close. “You are prey—”

  Alek head-butted the vampire with all his might.

  For a moment it seemed to have no effect. Michael dropped the scalpel and cradled his forehead with a low whine in his throat. Then all at once he went down hard, clunking the back of his head against the second stainless steel operating table. What Alek’s head-butt had not done, the fall had. Michael lay still on the cold tile, bleeding into the drain built into the center of the floor.

  Alek let out his breath and looked up.

  The figure watched him a moment, then disappeared, only to reappear a few moments later with something large and bulky. A second later the glass window of the operating theatre exploded outward in a glinting rain of glass, followed by the clattering old steel folding chair the figure had used to break the window. Phoenix leaped the ten feet to the floor of the theater in a swirl of dusty leather and long hair and legs.

  She straightened up and tossed her long ponytail of hair off her shoulder. She looked just beautiful in her ragged street wear and black leather jacket with the embroidery of skulls and red roses along the collar and back. Her gear, a close approximation of his own, looked cobbled together out of his closet and hers—a sling-backed tank top and faded denim cutoffs and tall leather boots with steel toes. Even the jacket, which had once belonged to Debra, was becoming on her. “I came,” she said.

  An odd thing to say. He expected something far more mundane.

  “Did I call you?” Alek asked, tilting his head on the table so he could watch her approach in her tall leather boots. It was a sincere question.

  “You were in trouble,” Phoenix said with a scowl. She rubbed at the ring on her thumb. His ring. Debra’s ring. “So I came.”

  “Thank you.”

  She ran a hand over his unmarred chest, then studied his shackles. “What did he do to you, Master? Did he hurt you?”

  “No. Nothing… yet.” He rattled the chains.

  “Where are the keys?”

  Alek glanced at the floor beside him. “Michael has them. Look in his jacket.”

  Phoenix turned to stare at the defiled body on the next table.

  “No, don’t look. Control. There is nothing you can do for him.”

  Phoenix nodded, then turned her attention on Michael. She approached the creature on the floor with a terrible wariness, almost a fear. She knelt down, reached for Michael’s pocket, then stopped to wrap her arms about herself and shiver violently. She looked up, miserable. “Is he doing something to me?”

  “No,” Alek said. “It’s your blood responding to a pureblood. Nothing more.”

  “Another lesson,” she answered as she started rifling through Michael’s pockets.

  As she worked, Alek said, “Did you see anybody else in the institute? Anyone at all?”

  Phoenix shook her head of blood-red hair. “Only a lot of blood. Like someone had been dragging themselves through it.”

  “Chimera.”

  She bit her lip and her head bobbed up. “Is he here?”

  “He was. But not anymore.”

  She nodded as she pulled loose a ring of keys from Michael’s trouser pocket. She fished through the various ones until she found one that looked like it fit the lock, a new one with no notches, rather like handcuff keys. A few moments later she had all the cuffs unlocked and removed. She put the keys on the table.

  But Alek didn’t move to rise just yet.

  She stood over him, anxious. “Master… ”

  He closed his eyes as he summoned what strength he had left. “Just weak.”

  Phoenix put her arms under his shoulders and helped him to sit up. The room spun with light and shadows and he clung to her a moment and waited until the dizziness lessened. Her smell was beautiful and wild, like the night. Her entire being was. He buried his face in her shoulder a moment like she had on the night she revealed her weakness to him. He was so happy she had come for him. Her being there seemed to soothe and invigorate him. He only wished he wasn’t so needy, so hungry, so much a danger to her.

  Phoenix touched the wound in his shoulder, then tilted his head back and unlaced her shirt.

  “No… ” he whispered.

  “It’s your blood too.”

  “Right now… I might hurt you.”

  “You won’t.” She stroked his sweat-dampened hair and invited him to take. “Let me help you.”

  He kissed her skin but did not break it. “My beloved one,” he said. “Help me up.”

  30

  She did. Her master could stand, but his weakness was terrible, making his entire body feel like a big rag doll she was trying to holding up almost entirely by her own strength. He was so lank and thin yet his weight was considerable enough to nearly throw her off balance as she helped him get his balance. She wished he were not so stubborn. Better he take a little of her blood and stand on his own than abstain out of his foolish fear of harming her and make her bear his entire weight. But one look at his hard vermilion eyes—feverish, needy eyes like red amber burning through the dark, yet eyes as unyielding at the earth itself—told her she was fighting a losing battle. He had too much Control. So gathering her strength, Phoenix walked him to the door of the theatre, then leaned him against the wall as she crouched down to study the old-fashioned latch.

  “Locked,” she said. And she had left the keys on the table.

  She went to get them.

  Her master was too weak to do little more than say her name and try and take her by the arm.

  But he missed.

  She spotted the flutter of motion on the floor from the corner of her eye. “What…?” But before she had time to even register it as the awakening vampire, it was on her—ravaging her like something inhuman and in pain. It did not seem that it had even moved from its spot on the floor, yet there it was, all around her, all claws and feral power, pushing her to the floor under its tremendous force, consuming her with its sheer bulk, covering her in foaming spit and blood.

  Phoenix screamed going down, her voice a low snarling sound like an animal taken unaware by a bigger predator, a sound she scarcely recognized as coming out of her own mouth. Fear wracked her and stopped her thinking. Fear and hate. It was a raw, sore hate, like a wound reopened. She was pulled to the floor under the power of her own fear as much as by the power of the vampire. She gritted her teeth until the blood ran over her mouth.

  Then she lashed out at it, not thinking. Reacting.

  Her hand encountered its face. It bit her like a rabid dog, again and again, snarling her own blood up through its nose, holding on, trying to tear her apart. Its hands went everywhere on her, destroying. Phoenix screamed again and again in utter pain and defiance but it did nothing, nothing to stop the monster, to change their destiny. Her destiny. Her destiny was to be a bloodied and battered victim, pressed down into the had asphalt somewhere in a lonely place while a vile, blood-seeking beast violated her again and again, its raw, stinking hands on her face, in her mouth, its body grating against her own with evil energy, stealing everything that was inherently hers, her life, her identity, her power, reducing her to the unwanted piece of garbage she always fea
red she was. Knew she was. And that was bad and terrible and sad and tragic, but she could live with that. She could live with being a victim. She could live failing herself. But that body beside her—the small, ravaged blonde one who should have been protected by her and by nature and by God and whatever Powers there might be, the innocent body of the little mortal girl smashed, a white, dead, blood-spattered lily—that Phoenix could not live with. She could not live with that failure.

  She could not live with the sorrow.

  She could not live with it any longer.

  Reaching, she put her hands up on the face of the vampire killing her and gave her sorrow to him instead.

  The vampire stopped killing her and stiffened, its mouth full of her blood and flesh. It looked up at her. It wasn’t human and never had been. It belonged to some dark corner of hell. And that’s exactly where she wanted it to go.

  And it did, in a mighty whoosh of air and blue flames that lit the theatre like a supernova, like midday, like hell, like the sun it could not tolerate. The fire consumed it, ate it like it had meant to eat her, bursting it like a toy, like something not real, something made all of glass and wood and air and dreams. And when the holocaust of fire passed, leaving spots of light and darkness on her eyes and her face raw and singed and her hair crackling and her clothing all but crisped on her tortured frame, there was nothing left of the vampire, the monster, but a rain of blackened bones and soot.

  And as the ashes fell upon her face, the sorrow was still.

  Like the darkness, like her world, it was still.

  31

  Extraordinary,” Jean Paul said, when the tale had been told.

  They were sitting together in the garden in the middle of the night, an odd twosome, to be sure. Alek turned to the Parisian and raised one eyebrow. Almost a month had passed since the events of that night at the institute. And neither he nor Phoenix had made mention of it since. It seemed unnecessary. Life goes on. And it paid to look ahead, not back. So this was the first time he found himself recounting the events to anyone.

  It had been a little after three in the morning when he found JP on his stoop. He was surprised. He had never encountered the man outside of Club Bauhaus. Yet there he was, dapper as always in his customary white suit, as immaculate as the Pope, silver-headed walking stick in hand. He might have resembled any gentleman on a tryst through New York City, except that he looked as if he belonged in a black and white photograph from the turn of the century.

  Alek didn’t quite know what to do with him, so he invited JP inside. But JP, being JP, decided the study was too stuffy for his liking. Alek assumed it was the Colonial-English décor that had rubbed JP the wrong way. JP found anything English appalling and cretinous. The Parisian asked if they might retire to the garden instead. And Alek saw no reason why they could not.

  It was an odd hour to be entertaining company, but at least he brought his own wine.

  “Wine?” Alek asked somewhat suspiciously in the moments before JP uncorked the bottle.

  “Not the house blend, I assure you,” JP said rather drolly. “Pascal Bouchard Bouquet Chardon 1897.” His eyes halved like those of a playful cat. “And what did you expect?”

  “I never know what to expect from you,” Alek answered honestly.

  JP toasted him, then put his wineglass down, untouched.

  Alek sipped his wine, savoring the taste. “You can’t have her back.”

  JP looked innocent.

  Alek smirked knowingly in return. “You don’t want her back, JP. She’s not your type.”

  “You realize she would have been a wonderful addition to my stables.”

  “I don’t think so, JP.”

  Jean Paul fell silent, and together they watched the moon fade in the night sky.

  In time, perhaps a half hour before true dawn began to break, JP stood up with a sigh and took up his stick and put on his traveling hat—a white derby to go with the natty white suit—and gave Alek a gentlemanly bow. “Another night ends, so I shall bid you good day. Rest well, Slayer.”

  “Rest well, Hivemaster,” Alek said, standing.

  “Please,” said JP, “I know the way.”

  Alek sipped his wine and watched the Parisian amble down the garden path to the gate. But as JP opened the gate, he suddenly turned back to Alek and tilted his head. “Tell me, Slayer, how can you say such a gorgeous and talented creature as the Phoenix would not enhance my demimonde?” He smiled wryly.

  Alek returned the smile with one just as wry. “Because, Hivemaster, there is nothing in this world that Phoenix hates more than vampires.”

  32

  Two days later Alek read the news in the Times. On his way to a private meeting with someone from one of the bigger networks at the Skytop Café, his usual haunt for such rendezvous, bestselling author J. Stephan Paul was broadsided by a semi turning off onto Broadway at well above the speed limit.

  There were no survivors and the driver of the truck was unaccounted for. It was being considered a hit and run and the police were investigating the vehicle and driver, but so far they were unable to acquire any witnesses to the crime.

  Alek placed the newspaper in the fireplace and had Phoenix cinder it very slowly, her Control so powerful nothing else in the room was affected.

  The Church takes care of its own.

  33

  Immortal Beloved was the name of the cargo ship. That much Sam Kelly knew when he signed on. But in the two weeks since he’d been aboard the rusty, run-down ship, The Beloved, as they called her, had not docked at any ports. And strange for a cargo ship, the hold was nearly empty. It contained only five large, unmarked wooden boxes. That was all Kelly knew until today, when The Beloved glided to port along the coast of Rome and the harbormaster began ringing the bell which heralded the workers down to the pier to unload the ship.

  A man came with them. He wore red robes with a small red cap on the bald dome of his head. So it was Vatican cargo then.

  A storm had been brewing off the coast all day, making the men nervous about a squall, and in their haste, the workers managed to snag one of the crates on the cargo crane while trying to transfer it to the tossing deck of the patrol boat. Wood splintered and sent the contents of the crate rolling everywhere across the deck of the Immortal Beloved. Luckily, the smaller cargo crates inside the larger one were well padded and experienced little damage in the impact. Only one small crate actually broke, releasing a large stainless steel canister that reminded Kelly of a decanter for Margarita mixes. That or some kind of space-age canoptic jar. The canister rolled down the sloping deck of The Beloved and came to a halt almost at his feet where Kelly was dutifully mopping the deck.

  The canister clinked as the contents settled, then clinked again.

  And then a third time.

  The cardinal came to collect the canister himself. “This is archival material. Very fragile and important. Don’t let your men damage anything further!” he shouted in Italian to the harbormaster.

  The harbormaster muttered many apologies and excuses.

  Kelly, still mopping, caught the eye of the cardinal as the man in his imposing robes and rings turned back to observe the rest of the cargo being unloaded from the hold. Then he looked at the canister the cardinal held. And again he heard it clink.

  Like someone knocking.

  The cardinal looked at him with his shrewd, knowing eyes.

  And then Sam Kelly looked away. For reasons he could not explain, the sight of the canister left him dead cold.

  The End

 

 

 
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