She smiled at his uneasiness like the devil she was and flicked the end of her braid over her face like a rouge brush. He had a sudden image of himself lying over her in the dark somewhere, bathed in sweat and passion, his hair in her face, his teeth in her throat...
Her smile grew coy. Her image then. Her spell.
He tore his eyes away from her and ventured a step. "I can't stay here, I can't--."
"Amadeus."
He moved a ways away from the carousel, to the edge of the bicycle path. At a distance came the muffled clopping of horses' hooves on snow-packed gravel. He glanced upward. The trees of the park rose bravely against the cold and a future of industry and glass and smog. Far off, the city shown like an expensive set of diamonds in black velvet. The Brooklyn Bridge winked like a collapsing web spun by a spider made all of light and glitter. But here, with his back turned toward her, he could not see the face of his tormentor, nor see her evil smile, nor hear her lasciviously whispered thoughts. He cocked his head up at a sky pregnant with black ice. "He draws on me."
"Blood calls to blood. But where will you go?"
Where could he go? He was homeless rabble now, like the man at the trash basket, no better, and the reality of it stuck in his gut like a blade. The night would pass away in only a few short hours and anything that had seemed safe and temporary in the dark, like the lights on the bridge and all the nightsins the city had to offer, would soon be gone with it. He had no real friends to speak of outside the Coven, no one who could understand this thing and not think he was insane. The studio would have been staked out by the Coven by now. And he could never see the dolphins in his bedroom window again--because Amadeus knew, and his blood ran through the Father's veins. They were married still.
Where could he go? Where?
His mouth trembled. "He'll find me."
"Of course he will."
He thought of the suburbs, then Connecticut, then farther north. How far north? He didn't know. Who the fuck cared? No matter how far he ran it wouldn't be enough. If he went to Iceland it wouldn't be far enough. "Go away. He'll kill you too. Get as far away from me as you can." He waited, the wind in his coat and a hand in his snow-wet hair, combing it slick across one cold cheek, thinking blankly, wondering what the hell he would do. He waited forever, but when he looked back at last she was there still, slender as a bone, doll-like in her simple beauty. She would shatter under the barbarity of his most careful touch, he knew, had he dared to touch her.
"Go away," he whispered, hoarse. "It's finished."
She smiled, flashed her ruby eyes at him.
It wasn't fair.
"God damn you," he whispered.
"Walk away from me," she said, "if you can."
She knew magic. Vixen. Sorceress.
It was not fair.
"I can't move," he complained.
"Try."
He went to her. He knelt at her feet. She held the mantle of his head to her breast as if in benediction. "See. You can."
His tears soaked all her raven hair. "I love you."
"You love Debra."
"I want to die for you. Please don't leave me. I love you."
Her fingers burned his cheeks as he expected they would. Red fire to cleanse and to sanctify. Her mouth was red against his, the lightest branding. She licked the tears from his cheeks and chin and left behind only wetness and warmth and the purity of her touch. She kissed him once more, on the side of the throat, over the pulse, and when she drew back her lips wore the paint of his life. His skin flushed inexorably, as if she had set him to burning.
Then she waited, patient, as if for some portent or some vow.
His trembling hands framed her face. All that perfect black hair, those ebony eyes with their scarlet hearts. Red. It was all that was missing, all that she needed to make her a goddess. He kissed her hair, her delicate throat. She sighed and turned her head, offering herself to him now with the same fearless passion she had used to steal away his soul. So unfair. So beautiful.
So perfect.
"I want so much to die for you," he whispered into her cold, winterfrost hair.
"But I want so much for you to live for me," she answered.
"I can't move."
The Covencircle raised their eyes.
The Father was seated at the head of the table, head hanging amidst a medusan tangle of white long hair, as still as a stone god. On the table lay the two katanas Sean had retrieved from the Village alley at the Father's behest some time ago. They'd fallen crossed, absurdly symbolic: Eustace's beneath and Alek's atop.
"I love you," uttered the Father in a drilling monotone.
Sean frowned. He glanced across the table at the others who had shown face tonight: Aristotle. Takara. Robot. Kansas. Doc Book. Every face was distorted with concern, but only Booker was seated far back in his chair, a keen look of understanding darkening his eyes, his sweat-slicked hands laced together on the table in front of him.
Sean smiled. "Worried about your childhood playmate, are you, bro?"
Booker returned Sean's look. Shut up, asshole, he mouthed.
The Father's voice grew theatrically plaintive. "I want to die for you. Please don't leave me. I love you."
Booker's face pinched in understanding. He nodded to himself.
What? Sean mouthed to him.
Alek, said Booker.
Sean pigged his eyes.
Booker sighed and tapped his temple with one finger. He's inside.
Oh. Righteous, man.
The Father lapsed into a long, contemplative silence after that, and Sean quickly lost interest. He watched the others look broody and lost and turn their rings and twist their hair and shoot all kinds of sidelong "I told you so" looks at one another. And when it all became too much, too boring, too overwhelming to stand it any more--the tension, the silence eating away at the room like an invisible cancer--he chewed his fingers, his eyes roving over the table and his master and the swords.
It was an amazing weapon, Alek's sword. Mirror-blade, white jade handle as carved as a bone.
"I knew he was trouble first time I set eyes on him," Takara whispered. Unlike the others, she sat still enough to rival even the Father. Her black eyes wept light like opals. Her white fist was wrapped tight as rope around the ornate hilt of the wakisashi she favored. She turned the wak in and touched the tip of the blade to her bottom lip. A bead of blood welled up there like a gem. "Even as a boy he had no right to it," she said, those eyes of hers set hard on the sword.
Her words brought to Sean's mind a curious picture: some gangly, darkly-maned kid all in black messing around with that sword while all those other lollipop-sweet kids like Wally and the Beave played with marbles and hoola-hoops or whatever the hell back in the wild and woolly 1950's. Sean laughed. Jaded from the beginning, jaded to the end. "He ain't no saint. He's just a fuckin' queer-o fruitcake, man. It was just a matter of time before he went tipped--"
Booker shushed them both.
Takara growled at Book.
Kansas flinched and reached for the imaginary brim of the hat he no longer wore.
Silent Robot only stared. Eerie.
"I want so much to die for you."
They all glanced up in time to see the Father's face shatter. "To die..." His hands shot out, knocking the swords clanking to the floor; then, with automatic precision, they spidered up to his face, those hands, covered his stupid, useless eyes, his fingers curling into talons in the soft pockets of flesh. The Father uttered a low keening noise to which every pore of the body opened itself to, his cry catching in every corner of the Great Abbey, quaking it to its bedrock and beyond.
Booker's dark face paled to sick grey and his knuckles showed white where his fingers gripped the edge of the table. Aristotle and Kansas whimpered and hid under the table together. Takara stiffened. Even Robot, usually as unmoveable as a corpse, as unshakable as the manmade, soulless creation which had given him his nickname, blanched and managed to go another shade paler,
if that was possible.
Sean cowered in his seat, nearly overturning the chair once more, as the blood ran freely down their Covenmaster's face and tainted the swords at his feet.
The water of The Pond was black as oil and the swan at its center blacker still, black, black as the winter sky full of unbroken ice. He was the only one of his flock left and he turned in slow, precise circles to keep the water from freezing beneath him. It reminded Alek of a book he'd once read as a young child. He could not remember the title now but he did remember the story: the prince of swans was heir to the Pond, but the city wanted to fill the pond up and build on it and then the waterbirds would have nowhere to raise their children. But the prince, being clever, had a plan. At autumn's end when his people flew to warmer places, he stayed behind and entertained the park's children with his clever antics. The artists and the TV people came from miles around to see him, and it was they who preserved the pond far the Prince and his people and their children and children's children. But then one midwinter's night the pond began to freeze, and he turned and turned to save himself, but the ice caught him up in the end as it must and by morning he was finished.
At the water's edge, standing on the bicycle path running alongside Central Park South, Alek tossed the Prince bits of sweetroll he'd purchased at a vender's kiosk on the avenue--the only food he could afford now with five dollars in his pocket and a cash card whose PIN number wouldn't work anymore. The swan did not notice the offering, however; he was too busy trying to live.
He would be gone by morning. The creed of the martyr: The heroes must always sacrifice themselves.
But he didn't want to be a hero and he didn't want to be a sacrifice. And it wasn't fair, goddamnit. He wasn't some latter-day Arthurian adventurer. The sky hadn't opened up. No one had called him. No lady rose from the lake now with a magic sword and a mission.
Teresa appeared at his side. "The ice--it won't be denied," she whispered in his ear.
Heartsick, he looked away from the Prince, seeking Teresa's old eyes in the solid black mirror of the water. "Why do you pursue this?" he asked. "For what purpose? Even if it were possible to harm the Coven, why--?"
"Walk with me," she said, "as if you have lived a thousand years and have no fear of me."
He did. And twenty minutes later he found himself sitting in one of the most exclusive restaurants in the city. It was the kind of place the Village artists usually joked about having lunch at because they knew it would take two or three weeks of scullery labor or slinging hash just to buy a hamburger there. He glanced around the dark, muted interior and could hardly believe he was here, that the two of them had been let in, looking the way they did. All around came the clink of priceless china and cutlery. Limited art prints covered the paneled walls, and white-jacketed waiters moved as deftly as magicians around the tables. In the darkened room he could see tables occupied by high-power corporate and publishing types sipping their Stolis and working the art of the deal. The restaurant had a strict dress code, but the maitre `d had said absolutely nothing about it when Teresa asked for a table near the back.
Alek wondered, in a remote part of his mind, if he or any of the waiters and patrons would even remember them after they left. But one thing was for certain: her choice was far from haphazard. Slayers, by their very nature, avoided these pits of luxuriant human existence like the plague. Even Booker would not dine here. Even him.
Teresa sat across from him, her eyes seeming to glow in the dark with a slow-burning inner fire. He found himself unable to look away. It was as if she were hypnotizing him. No, more than that. It was as if she were x-raying him, glancing through the layers of flesh and bone and blood and for a second time watching all the secret wormy things he kept inside and never showed anyone. And for the first time in his life he did not care because he knew she understood.
"Shall I tell you a story, caro mio? A tale to quell your incessant need to understand all things?"
He hesitated. To know--it would be yet another seduction, of course. She might not even tell him the truth, if a lie was what she needed to entrap him--to use him. Yet he would listen, wouldn't he? For no other reason than because he had no other choice at this point. Nowhere to go, nowhere he could hide from her.
Or from them--the slayers.
Teresa touched the surface of her water glass with one finger. "A dream of a war, you see, is a dream of history. There are the heroes and the villains and the cowards, too. And sometimes there are gods among men, mortal flesh and divine understanding commingled like a man whose blood is mixed with that of demons." She smiled, black eyes flashing beneath winged brows. And now Alek saw the innocent eyes of a young girl, the sleek whisper of a garbadine wimple upon her shoulders, her fingers braided through with rosaries. Again, she touched the water's surface, and this time the spell broke.
"I was seduced from the very moment of my birth, you see," she said. "I was born in Sicily at the end of the Roman Inquisition in the years before the Reformation, the eighth of a vast clan of business noblemen. And being the eighth, and tradition being what it was, it was understood that I would be dedicated by my family to the Vatican nunnery upon my fourteenth birthday. What they did not know, however, was that by the time I had reached that age I had murdered three villagers and two servants and drunk the blood from their ruptured throats."
Alek blinked but said nothing. He sipped his water.
"My father--he was not my sire. And my mother, dead upon my birth, could tell me no secrets. I was appalled by what I did, yes, appalled as a good Catholic girl should be, but that did not mean I was struck so with guilt that I confessed my sins to my family or the priests. Tales of the Inquisition loomed, the dismembering of accused witches, the unimaginable torture of the demon-infested and those accused of acts of vampirism--these things were too much of a reality. I was a coward instead, and a murderess. I dutifully joined the Vatican monastery and put the ring of Christ upon my hand and took my vows and did my thirsty huntings with the rats in the peasant slums of Rome and Tivoli. I chose my victims with care: newcomers off the boats, the homeless, those priests who thought to buy me for a night. I was not caught. Through it all, I was never caught."
She was whispering, and now he whispered as well. "You--how did you exist in a monastery--this is impossible!"
She ignored his outburst. She said, "I lied. I was caught, once. Caught by a priest in my act of murder. It was with one of the Castrati. The boy had wandered into my cell in the middle of the night, looking for something or lost. I took him. I was so hungry. And there he was, watching me from the doorway--"
"A...priest?"
"I flinched. I wanted to make excuses, say something to dissuade what he had seen, I was good at it, but clumsy, you see, but then--" Teresa lowered her eyes. "Then--he joined me. His name was Father Paris. He was a foreigner from Geneva. A priest with the Order of Scribes. And vampire, as I was. A drinker of human lives. A murderer, like me. He drank the blood off my mouth. And then he made love to me, the corpse still between us. He was so pleased to have found another of his breed, so happy."
He wondered if Teresa realized how uncomfortable he felt in this place. He wondered if this was some kind of test, to see if he truly belonged to the humans' world, or if it was a mere exercise to see how long his remaining sanity lasted. If the former, she already had his answer in the flesh he had slain for her not more than a few hours ago. If the latter, it was a test completely unnecessary, for there could be no question as to how far gone he was, to let her abduct him like this.
"I bound myself to Paris. We were married by a vampire bishop by the name of Aragon who dated back to maybe forever. He and Paris had been working together for years under the cloister of their enemy the Church, their nature unknown to the others, scribing the history of our breed's relationship with Rome--what history there was--seeking proof of our origins not as devils but as a people made by the Creator for a specific purpose. I joined them at once, transcribing great portions of th
eir history into Italian, seeking rare texts, stealing documents from the vaults that implicated the Vatican in a conspiracy to purge the entire world of every last vampire--anything that might help, anything at all."
"The Ninth Chronicle." Alek closed his eyes in defense.
She nodded. "Aragon," she said, "betrayed Paris. The work he had done was never for his kind. It wasn't to save us from another purge. It was for the pope and his Inquisitors. Hundreds of years earlier the Church had uncovered Aragon's secret and had traded him immunity for his services as a scribe and an assassin. The Church was never so ignorant of us. Aragon had used us to discover the names of all the vampires who had taken shelter in the shadow of the Vatican."
She hesitated. "There was a new purge, a silent one. Many vampires were dismembered, disfigured and beheaded--they were the lucky ones. Many others suffered the same punishment as witches. The burning stake. Sewn into a sack with a snake, a dog and a weasel and sunk in the sea. Ground crucifixion. Other punishing deaths. Unmentionable things.
"But because of Paris's work, some escaped. The Church was faced with the dilemma of hunting down all the survivors, a task that would take hundreds of years to accomplish. But, you see, their greatest weapon was always Aragon. In his pretense for peace with the mortals, he convinced the vampires to formulate the ordinances of the Covenant. The Coven was established as police to curb the possibility of another purge and the movement spread on the winds of pure terror and desperation. The vampires saw the restraints of the Covenant and the power of the slayers as the only possible way of avoiding certain agonizing death at the hands of the humans. The Church was never so powerful. And Aragon was never so pleased."
Alek blinked and looked up. "And the Chronicle?"
Teresa sat back. "It was buried in the vaults of the Vatican, where it remained up until 1962, when the Church began a series of reforms to modernize and resurface its image. In the process, it brought in a number of scholars to comb out and destroy the evidence of the `darker side of Christianity' as they called it." She narrowed her eyes gleefully. "And one of those scholars was Paris."
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