Slayer

by Karen Koehler

  Don't cry, Debra, he told her. It'll be all right, I promise. I'll be right here.

  But you won't be with me. We won't be together.

  He thought about her words, then pressed her back, inspired. >From under their bed where he kept his best treasures--a model of The Spirit of St. Louis made of popsicle sticks, the sockful of marbles he always beat Bobby Watson with at Dead Man's Square an the playground, his banned copy of Catcher in the Rye that Cook had given them, an issue of Popular Mechanics all about the Sputnik--and dug out the ring he'd found in a gutter in the street near the Fountain Avenue Dump a couple of months ago. Bobby insisted it was some cast-off junk, but Alek liked to believe it was far more valuable than that.

  "Your ring?"

  "Our ring," he said because he felt clever the way he did sometimes when he looked at a Picasso picture and could see different stories inside it and make up all his own on paper just from that one look. He turned the ring over; it felt heavy and warm and powerful in his hand. "It's magic. When you look into it, you'll see me."

  "That's stupid."

  "Is not. Look how it shines, look how it holds my image."

  And it did shine in the dim light of the reading lamp on their bedside table; it shone like a magic talisman in the stories they liked to read by Tolkien and others with their faraway lands and talking swords and beautiful dragons. And in the ring he studied was his own face, as plain as day. "Why is it magic, huh?"

  "Well...because something is, you know, if you want it to be. And we're lucky. We're magic. Everyone says so."

  The tears were on her cheeks like splashed gems. "Do you love me?"

  "You know I do. I'll always love you." He cupped her face and kissed her, razed his tongue along her teeth so she could taste him and take comfort.

  "Debra Knight."

  Her precious name sounded so unmusical coming through the harsh gravelly voice of their social worker standing in the door. And behind his impatient, chain-smoking figure were Debra's new foster parents, the McKinneys, a pair of middle-class white picket people with bovine faces and sympathetic eyes staring at them as if they were two poor Little Orphan Annies. Mrs. McKinney wore her trussed hair under a boxlike hat and Mr. McKinney was dressed in wool slacks and a dull yellow cardigan. They moved almost in sync and looked eerily like mechanical replicas of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson.

  Alek narrowed his eyes on them and touched his sister's face once, twice. She caught his hand, kissed it. My beloved, she told him, the words as soft and insinuating as a caress to his senses.

  "Come along, Debbie dear," said the grinning Harriet replica.

  "Debra," she said. Bitch. Her fist swallowed up his gift as she turned to her twin and smiled darkly and told him silently, like a promise, that she'd soon be back, soon, and all he must do is wait. Then she gathered up her box of belongings and followed the social worker out.

  Alek did not sleep that night, waking again and again. Afraid. Alone in his enormous bed. He listened to the raspy breathing of the new boy occupying the bed in the opposite corner, hating him. Hating everyone. He closed his eyes and brushed Debra's mind with his own, felt her wake gratefully from her own fitful sleep in a room painted in bright blushing pinks that was all wrong for her in a home set snug and safe behind a whitewashed fence in some upstate suburban town. He put his hand up on the wall over his bed, knowing she was doing the same thing.

  I want to fly away, Alek, she said.

  So did he.

  And then suddenly they were high above the city where the lights shivered and millions of voices whispered, and without ever having left their beds. It was magic, and so easy. It was how the twins learned they could fly. They linked hands and passed invisibly over sharp, lighted pinnacles, the thrill of vertigo tightening their hearts and throats and taking all the pain out of them because they were together now, in the only way they knew how, the only way left to them.

  And when Debra dropped in a sudden burst of laughter, Alek followed her to see what had entranced her so. She spiraled down and drifted ghostlike over a great wheel encrusted with hundreds of dark eyes. She dipped lower and then she was beneath the wheeled roof, slipping through a menagerie of painted wooden animals impaled on candy-striped poles, dancing through the strange forest before settling at last with a kind of sigh on the proud arch of the dolphin's back.

  Alek watched her from a shy distance, envious, almost afraid of her because she was so brave, and loving her because she was absolutely everything, the beginning and the end, his life and blood and desire made real. His balance.

  Afterward, Debra returned to him and carried him up over the carousel, and their innocent lovemaking was a dream of fluttery touches and gentle, searching kisses that left him breathless and so hungry.

  They visited the carousel in Central Park often after that first night, always with Alek drifting at its edge to watch his twin stroke the silvery body of the dolphin and swim at its side like a sea maiden, her hair ribboning behind her and her eyes the color of molten earth. But then the dawn would come, inevitably, and the dream would end and they would awaken separated, Debra in her doll house bedroom fixed by big children playing pretend and Alek in his sterile cage where he could hear whistling walk the halls of McEnroy Home in the early morning like a malevolent spirit waiting on the full moon and the bloodsport attendant thereon.

  Less than a month passed before Debra Knight was returned to McEnroy Home. The mealy-faced McKinneys were reluctant to elaborate on their reasons except to say that their childless union wasn't quite the torment it once was.

  Debra laughed that night as she turned full circle in their room, her bloodred camisole spinning like the scarlet wings of an exotic bird around her legs. Alek embraced her the moment she stopped and she kissed him and nipped at his ear in playful greeting.

  "How did you do it?"

  Debra laughed once more. "Oh so easy, my beloved," she said, casting back her head in delight, shaking out her hair. "I used the Method, of course."

  The Method. The old technique just about every kid at McEnroy had used to dissuade a stupid pair of foster parents from adopting you: break a few china plates, clog the pipes, act crazy or just downright rude. But it was more than that: Alek recognized that immediately. No foster family sent you back this fast, no matter how badly you wrecked their house. And he was certain to remind her of that fact.

  Debra laughed anew, full of the glee of revenge. "I took their little bird and cooked it. It was absolutely delicious. Mrs. McKinney's expression, that is."

  He drew back. He felt pale, a little sick.

  But then she looked at him and kissed him again and it was like in all the stories, but with the spell being made and not broken with that kiss, and Alek's love for her was too great for his revulsion and, finally, he kissed her back. But now her mouth was different, her eyes deeper, a shade wilder, and Alek felt he held some strange savage goddess in his arms. What had she learned the last few weeks? How was she so different?

  He tried to search her mind but she shrugged teasingly away from him, both physically and mentally, and he was mystified when she climbed into the open bedroom window where the summer nightwind turned her gown to flames and her hair to a living cloak of sapphire darkness and smiled invitingly and put out her hand to him.

  "Fly with me, Alek, pleeeease?" she pleaded.

  Out there? In their physical forms?

  "Debra, we can't!"

  "Why?"

  "What do you mean why? We can't! We just can't! It'd make the grownups angry."

  "Who cares if the grownups are angry?"

  And he opened his mouth to argue, but there was no real argument inside of him, only fear, small and gnawing like a little mouse, and he was embarrassed by it..

  "In case you haven't noticed, there is a world out there, Alek," Debra told him. "And I want you to play with me in it! Right now!"

  And so he put his hand in his twin's as he must, and they played in the dark with their shiny eyes that nig
ht as they would many nights afterward, hide-and-seek and tag and some strange game Debra had learned where you waited until an animal or insect was inches from your absolutely still hand, probing or sniffing it, and you could catch it so quickly it hadn't even a chance to panic.

  But with that game and time the wildlife around the Home became boring and Debra guided him to the rabbit holes in Central and Battery Park and to the tenement backlots where skeletonized strays burrowed deep into Dumpsters. And she'd learned where the pigeons were and where to find the pond geese by night and the method of catching them and soothing them to silence with her touch and her whispers. At least until the night her little captured rabbit died of fright. Debra cut it open in curiosity and studied its strange and beautiful and jewel-like little organs, the jellylike shine of its secrets.

  "Do you see?" she said, pointing out its tiny, muscular heart. "Without this its blood wouldn't move. It's like a machine, Alek, a pretty machine." Then she smiled. And quite unexpectedly, she pressed the naked little beast to her twin's lips as if it was a Communion chalice and watched, pleasantly amused, as Alek writhed away from it with a mixture of revulsion and curiosity. She laughed at him, put her finger in the crimson pool and painted his mouth red. And this time when the chalice was passed he did not balk but sipped carefully from the vessel of life, raw and delicate and hitter and wild.

  It was a curious thing, not unnatural, exactly, only...unfamiliar. Animals were meant to be eaten anyway.

  "I thought it tasted like pepper and flowers," Debra told him afterward.

  "What are we?" be asked her in response as they lay down together in bed that night, for though his belly was swollen and warm with their repast, his intellect demanded to be fed as well.

  Her mind laughed at him and she called him a poor, miserable philosopher. She turned over and kissed him all over, making him laugh and squirm with the sensation. Finally, when her cold delicate little lips found the thicket scratch on his cheek he felt her stop, sip, drink the blood gently off his shallow wound as if she hadn't had enough with the rabbit, would never be filled. You know the word, she laughed.

  He thought of the movies they'd seen, the stories in the comic hooks. Vampires.

  Eww, no, she said. Demigods, she said because she'd learned the word somewhere and it meant something like an angel.

  After that it became the routine of their lives. The couples who were comfortable with their safe, beautiful lives habitually fell in love with and wanted the china doll beauty of McEnroy Home to compliment their pristine ivory houses. At least until she produced the red shade of death in their household, when she was dutifully returned to the Home and to Alek.

  Still, the twins were together every night, even in their brief separations, because they could fly. And fly they did, over the city and through it, sometimes as ghosts and sometimes as demigods, but always as mates, and with nothing to mar their dark, perfect happiness but the smiling nightmare of Ms. Bessell and the whistling.

  9

  The girl was not Debra.

  Why had he thought she was? A trick of the light, perhaps, or the fantasy of her doll-like, sensuous face floating before him, her breath on his throat. Those great dark eyes. But she was not Debra. And Alek understood with all the violence of an epiphany that he was about to die by Debra's doppleganger. Die. Slain by a creature with the body of an angel and the eyes of a lilith, and yet he could not move, could not rise, could not flee or start or cry out even as the creature placed her delicate long bony hands to either side of his head and tipped his face up, her makeupless old eyes boring black holes through his skull and far back into the most intimate chambers of his mind and memories.

  So easy for her she was so old and talented: The Home. Debra. The Bitch. The tears. Fear. Alone. Debra. The McKinneys. Debra. Blood. Kisses. The Sheridans and the Forsythes and the Strakers. Blood, more blood, the will of Debra. Debra and the rabbit, the dead rabbit. Blood. The Coven. More blood, more. Madness. Debra, Debra, Debra...

  He jerked once near the end, stiffened like a corpse in the girl's hands. No. Please, dear God please, I don't, I can't--

  He fell away from her emptily and hit the ground at her feet, face to the broken asphalt, prostrate before her because he neither had the strength nor the will to rise. She'd taken it all and he was bereft. He wanted to destroy her--needed to, if only to kill what she'd learned about him--but he would never pick up that sword again. Not now, not now--not when all its tragedies had been revealed to her.

  Instead, he remained as he was, cheek numbing against the ground, his eyes open but seeing it all blindly, without purpose or control. All of it. Compulsively. From the beginning to the end like a horror movie played in fast forward. The blood. Bessell. Debra. Amadeus. The carousel. Debra. Debra. He wept. He didn't care now if the vampire reached for him in hate or in hunger and soiled the floor of the city with his blood. It was all right. It would at least be closure, the edges of his thwarted fate coming together.

  He would be with Debra once more--

  "Mister Alek? My laws, Mister Alek!"

  His eyes swept open, his head angling toward the voice, letting it drag him back to the present. The alley, already tight, stony black with graffiti and night, seemed to shrink further down around the wide, boyish bulk of the figure standing over him with such concern. Eustace. Damned fool. Why couldn't the whelp just let him be? Why couldn't he just let his elder die in peace?

  Eustace tugged annoyingly at his arm. "Mister Alek, are you hurt, sir?"

  Yes.

  "Talk to me, Mister Alek!"

  No. Leave me alone.

  "Mister Alek!"

  No, not Mister Alek. Just Alek, once. Just Beloved. Just that, once, when I belonged to her...

  Eustace let him go finally and stumbled back to eye the creature stationed not a dozen paces away from them, watching them with her bejeweled masklike eyes. Catlike. Waiting. White-faced Kabuki doll in all her medusan tangles of midnight hair and red eyes and lacy bloodstained dress. Black leather coat. Chains. Too old for her, that coat, and that dress too young, like an old whore had dressed her. How old was she? How old could anything be? Her hands slid like fragile white spiders down the line of her hip and thigh. Her eyes darkened. Her lips parted silkily. She had fanged eyeteeth, upper and lower, like the mouth of a great cat. Like something unevolved and primitive. She was old, old to smile like that with such teeth. She would pounce and tear his throat out and it would all be finished. Him. Eustace. All of it. The end. Fertig.

  "Don't worry, Mister Alek, sir, I won't let nothing happen to you, sir, I promise, I double promise!"

  Eustace drew his sword and parried it at the creature like a poker. The creature snarled in response and shrank away. Eustace advanced on it, trembling, jabbing at it, winging the brickwork with the tip of the delicate and powerful weapon. Hooting like a kid driving swine.

  The creature retreated to the back, stopped, spun around. Nowhere to go; she'd reached the dead end wall. No fire escape to jump to, no boxes to climb, no windows and no window ledges. Eustace had her boxed in. She put her back to the wall and only watched him approach with wary, unblinking eyes. Her demeanor was distant, unafraid; she seemed to understand innately that the game was almost over and there was nothing she could do to derail this simpleton's prerogative.

  But this was no good. No good at all. What was Eustace doing? This wasn't the way. This was never the way. Why didn't they understand? Why didn't anyone understand this wasn't the way?

  Alek was on his feet, the sword at his side. He could rise after all, he discovered; he could take up the sword. He did have the strength and the will after all, and he would show Eustace the way, would show them all the way. Because he knew the way, could imagine it, like he could imagine every picture months or years before he painted it, like the way he knew all the stories inside all the pictures he d ever looked into. It was so easy, so clear and easy and full of truth. Magic. It was like a different soul stepping into him, an older sou
l, one with all or most of the answers. A soul he trusted with his life.

  He stalked forward, wielding his weapon like a wing, and with that wing he took flight.

  Sean Stone's eyes pigged in irritation when be heard the noise for the first time. His chair was cocked back on two legs, his feet propped up on the edge of the Coventable, and he didn't pay it much notice at first because he was paging through a four-year-old flesh mag with a set of straight pins at hand, using them to spear the whore's tits and faces, and alternately to peel back the cuticles on his thumbnails to get the blood to rise. His fingers were an aching ruin, two of the fingernails stripped dead away, and the pinups he was torturing were no longer naked; they were gowned in his blood.

  Mom used to hate his habit.

  His face hardened at the memory. He realized he hadn't thought of his mother in fucking years, not since she'd rode the speedball to the stars over ten years ago. Mom in that black rubberlike dress, beautiful and cold as the Snow Queen in the old fairy tale, white-gold hair down to her skinny ass. But her fragile frame had belied her strength; her hand had had the power of a brick when it connected with his face, knocking his chronically bleeding fingers out of his mouth, her fingernails fine slivers of ice when they pinched and twisted into his flesh.

  He used to like her better stoned. She'd put him to bed and read things to him when she was flying out of her skull. His storybooks or her Harlequins or whatever the hell she had, it didn't matter, not to him. But then after a while she'd crash, and then she went fucking nuts and cried and screamed a lot about her fucked-up abortion and how much he was costing her in food. Like he ate much, or all that often. Sometimes she'd break things, or try to break him. Didn't work.

  But, man, that was then. This was now. A lifetime ago, all that shit. A lifetime since he was a little turd with snot and blood and fear smeared all over his face. And, man, he'd evolved since then, changed. He'd gone from bleeding himself to the sticky-furred crawly things in the alleys around Slim Jim's Shangri-La, where they lived and Mom worked, to Slim Jim himself finally one night. The stupid bastard--he'd caught Sean alone in the apartment one night, put a stiletto under his chin, unzipped his pants, and told him he was up for his first business lesson. And Jimbo had thought Sean would be the surprised one--what big eyeteeth you have, grandma, heh-heh.