Slayer

by Karen Koehler

  But to his utmost surprise, instead of reaching across the bar and making Sal intimate with that oversized pigsticker of his, Knight looked down and away. "Would you buzz Akisha please? I'll understand if she doesn't want to see me."

  "Huh?"

  "Please." He looked up, his eyes inky. A tear? "I need to see her."

  Sal shook his head. Poor fucker. Akisha was great about everything down here--but upstairs was a different matter completely. No one saw her without an invitation, except maybe Leigia, and even there Sal wasn't certain the dame could just come and go as she pleased. It was Akisha's only vanity. And she certainly wasn't going to want to see the face of her bound lover's murderer. Still, he might as well make a show of it, just in case Knight was hauling that pigsticker around with him; he picked up the phone and buzzed Akisha's office on the twentieth floor.

  "Knight wants to see you, Mistress," said Sal. "You want I throw him out?"

  Damn his courage! Was he going fucking crazy in his old age? he wondered.

  "Knight?" came Akisha's slithering voice.

  Sal glanced up at the slayer. "Yeah, big guy, black hair--you know, the one with balls enough to show his face `round here after carving up the Master?"

  There was a lengthy silence. Sal could hear the static on the phone. He could hear the breathing of the slayer. He could hear his own breathing. It was like a fucking Carpenter film. He'd scream if Akisha didn't say something pretty soon.

  Finally: "Send him up to my lounge, Sal."

  Well, this is something new, thought Sal. He hung up the phone numbly. "Go on up," he told the slayer. "Twentieth floor. Stairs at the back."

  "I know." Knight nodded and smiled, showing the tips of his petite but still impressively sharp set of eyeteeth, almost like he wasn't embarrassed by them. Then, without aplomb, he crossed the Abyssus to the back to the service stairwell and started to climb. And it was the damnedest thing--it was as if he'd expected no other reaction.

  13

  The erotic image of a woman lying back on a purple divan, red heat lamps set in the wall giving her flesh a warm, rosy semblance, was the first thing to greet Alek when he entered the lounge. Her upper arms were prisoners of coiled reams of cruel-looking barbed wire, and he felt immediately an unfamiliar ache in his teeth at the sight. She stared at her image in the ceiling mirrors and reached down to run one bloody hand down the front of her diaphanous white gown. "You came," she whimpered as if drunk or stoned or in some mystical way operating far outside her body. "Akisha said you would. She said...your touch is like steel." She nodded solemnly. "I love Akisha."

  He tried to ignore her; even in the red of the lights he could see the razor scars all over her body. Hundreds of artistic markings like tattoos, each one the stigmata of a passage, a passion. A passage toward what? A passion for what?

  "Death," said Akisha, emerging from the darkness and into the halflight of the lounge's oval stained-glass window, the diffused, bluish light of it turning her flesh transparent under her scarlet Jean Harlow-inspired nightgown. "Death and rebirth." Long matching evening gloves covered her arms, and a choker of white diamonds that had once belonged to Elizabeth Taylor was around her throat. Her spike-heeled mules hardly made a sound on the hardwood floor as she moved.

  Alek looked again at Akisha's girl. She emanated a scent like steel and roses so that he had to make a conscious effort to completely ignore her. "Does she know that nothing you do can make her any different? Does she know how different we really are from them?"

  Akisha tipped her head, her peltlike black hair falling forward to brush the hollows of her cheeks. "Close enough to mate, but not close enough to turn one another?" She arched a black eyebrow, then turned to face him fully and grace him with that rarest of her gifts: her predatory smile. "I don't think Leigia knows much of anything right now."

  "You should tell her. These children--"

  "And lose yet another lover?"

  Alek grunted in agreement and walked to the room's old-fashioned French windows. He opened one of them and stepped out onto the balcony where the air was so much fresher and colder and more open. He looked out over the dark distant mass of Central Park. On the far side he could just see the lights of buildings on Fifth Avenue. Akisha came and stood in the doorway behind him, and for the first time in years he felt truly old. Like the city, he would live forever, but unlike the city, and Akisha's girl and all the other mortal children in the club downstairs, he would never truly be a part of this world's vibrancy. Not this world--not the Coven's. He had traded in the church's redemption for the chilled eternity of the rogue. He almost thought he would go and be feeling sorry for himself again, but he realized he was tired of growing sentimental over city lights.

  The moon was fading fast from the sky and he felt a sudden need to call it back, to raise his head and howl aloud to it like some fool Lon Chaney-inspired character in a creepshow. All those years exerting control and a priest's restraint, and yet, buried deep, he was hungering all along as badly as the worst of his race. He closed his eyes and felt the cold nightwind brush his cheeks and wondered what new madness this all would take him into.

  "I am sorry about Empirius. About Carfax. All of them. Every one--I can't tell you..." His voice trailed away uselessly.

  Akisha reached the parapet rail that ran around the balcony and stood a short way off from Alek, looking out over the city. "So it's happened, has it? You've been awakened." Her voice--it was less like that of a seductress and more like a friend, some old friend from the distant past, someone surprised but not really angry to be remembered only now, in a time of need.

  She turned to him, the gems gleaming and reflecting the red of her gown at her throat. "Tell me what happened, tell me," she said, sliding back against the rail. Like her choker, her eyes gleamed cold, but in them was the suffering wisdom that came only with long life. The wisdom of sorrowful experience. Akisha had been witness to empires crumbling and returning to life a dozen times; nothing he could say would shock her, or could.

  He opened his mouth, and like a confession, he found himself recounting the events of the night leading up to his arrival here at the Abyssus. He spoke carefully and calmly, leaving nothing out, and doing his best to appear impartial to it all. As he talked, Akisha grew serious and thoughtful, but she neither questioned nor interrupted him.

  And then finally he was done and she stared at him evenly but said nothing. And the silence was too great and he turned back to the city and gripped the rail until his fingers hurt and he said, "I don't know where to go, what to do. I thought of you. I thought of what you did for Debra. You were someone she trusted. I thought maybe...I don't know." He looked up. "Maybe she told you something. Maybe she knew where the Chronicle was or knew who did."

  Akisha watched a pleasure boat moving up the Hudson. "I don't know that there's much to know. I don't know that it even exists."

  "It exists. I have to find it. Without it...it's just a matter of time before they come. And I can't fight them all, I can't do this alone, Akisha. Please." He heard the pitiful whining of his voice and despised it, and himself for being brought down to this level--begging help from one of his victims.

  Akisha moved along the parapet rail so she was closer to him. Her voice was soft and breathy. "You are not alone. You were never alone. You have the sword. You have Debra."

  He shook his head in denial. "I'm so afraid. I don't think--"

  "Then don't, little whelp," Akisha scolded in Japanese. "Don't think. Feel. Do what you must in vengeance, not fear, never that."

  She moved even closer to him, and Alek suddenly wished that she hadn't. She was stirring emotions inside of him and his feelings were quite complicated already. He closed his eyes yet again, putting the veil of absolute darkness between them, but her perfume was all but overwhelming. He thought of hot airless nights heavy with jasmine, wisps of cloud on a full dirty city moon. He could feel the touch of her breath. Beneath the perfume it had a uniquely sweet, carnivorous smell. De
bra.

  "Yes, do it for her," Akisha whispered and kissed him on the corner of the mouth, the lightest touch, as much a brand of benediction as passion. "Our love for our kin is what binds our spirits to them. They are never very far off. But you knew that already. You always knew that. Avenge her, for vengeance and honor is the only path of the true warrior, my whelp."

  It was near daybreak when the second slayer stepped into the club. He wasn't like the other, darker, one. This one was a holocaust of whiteness. It hurt Sal's senses to look on all that wintry flesh and hair. Fingernails like slivers of ice and pale, pupilless eyes. Black leather coat. Long long ponytail of hair. Christ.

  The slayer swayed between the sweating, gyrating teenaged bodies like death loosened among a field of wildflowers. He stopped only once to gaze up with a scowl at the grinding, feedback-riddled music onstage, then moved on past.

  Sal nodded at Pip and Kyle.

  Standby, boys.

  The freak approached the bar and put his talonlike hands up on the bumper. His coat parted a little with the gesture and Sal spotted the getup beneath. Not goth or punk. Amish, or those other strange ones, Mennonites or whatever the hell they called themselves. Sal looked the freak up and down. Black wool suit and rabato, white hair tied with a hank of black silk ribbon. What now, fucking Pilgrim undead bullshit?

  "A pilgrim I am, sir," spoke the slayer, and his voice was coarse like his big ragged chain-wrapped coat, vaguely accented, "on a pilgrimage."

  Sal laughed, couldn't help himself. "Look like Cotton Mather in those threads, dude," he said. "You an Amadeus groupie, or what?" He kicked himself a second time that night. Good going again, Salvatori. You just insulted the slayers' grand master by running your mouth off at this dickface Amadeus wannabe. He might just as well have shit on the Mona Lisa. He knew plenty slayers who went around in chains and bleached cornstarch-white hair and phony Nazi-inspired accents, and most of them had pretty much the same short, sword-wielding temperaments as the king slayer himself. He reached for a glass and began to polish it vigorously

  The groupie frowned, ran a hand over his clothes. "A costume? Not in my time. A...groupie? No."

  Sal laughed once more. These slayers. He tried to move away from the freak, but the freak only put his long ugly hand around Sal's wrist.

  "I must see Akisha," said the freak.

  Sal looked at the hand, at the hand's owner. Was he actually swaying a little side to side? Sal shivered, tried to look away, but something was happening to the freak's eyes, something impossible, even by vamp standards. Were they actually darkening at their pitlike centers? Narrowing? Vertically? "Akisha's sure a popular one tonight."

  "Another was here to see your mistress? Was he a dark tall man with eyes like obsidian and a beauty to match?"

  Something hissed insinuatingly and Sal finally mustered enough will to glance down. One of the freak's untrimmed fingernails had actually broken free of his middle finger and slipped with scaly serpentine grace up the back of Sal's hand. "Who the living fuck are you?" Sal demanded.

  "Answer the question."

  "Get the fuck outta here before I--"

  The thing attached to the back of his hand bit him at the same moment the slayer hit him in the throat. Sal dropped the sauterne he was polishing and rocked back into the frosted saloon mirror behind the bar, his hand and throat coldly ablaze with pain. The mirror marbleized on contact. Motherfucker punched me! Sal thought in some remote self-righteous corner of his mind as he watched a bottle of good Chardonnay fall to the floor and shatter like a body thrown from an enormous height. He punched me!

  A girl screamed and he heard the unmistakable twang of a guitar string breaking. People looking at him, pointing to him. The slayer smiling demurely. Pip and Kyle doing nothing. Nothing! Everyone watching the barkeep getting soaked in a widening pool of spilt Sangria. Stupid bastards, didn't anyone ever see a guy get kayoed before?

  Sal looked down at himself to see what the others were looking at with such rapt interest. Not punched. He wasn't punched. A punch did not leave two gaping holes in your carotid artery through which your lifeforce escaped like a bitch.

  The slayer said, looking on him, "The milk of the serpent is far sweeter than the blood of the vine."

  Too bad, though, Sal thought miserably as his consciousness leaked away with his immortal life. Boss lady gave such good benefits, too.

  Alek took Akisha's rosewood shirasaya from the glass display case and unsheathed the lethally sharp blade concealed in the seemingly harmless staff. The scabbard and handle were made from a single piece to match perfectly. He ran his thumb over the engraved mara-tu symbol of the craftsman marking the perfection of the blade and felt a curious sickness in the pit of his stomach. He wondered where his katana was. It felt as if an unbreachable chasm existed between himself and all hope.

  "You are feeling its displacement as a warrior should," Akisha said to him as she went to sit by the side of her blood whore. She placed her fingertips on the girl's forehead, producing an almost visible flow of energy as she put the girl under her influence a little deeper. The girl let out a long, deep-throated sigh as Akisha sent her to a world of erotic shadows and susurrating words and touches. Almost as a reflex, the mortal ran a hand along the inside of her thigh. "Love you so much, Akisha...so so much..."

  When Akisha was assured that she was completely under, she turned her attention back on Alek and became almost brusque. "You should never have separated yourself from it. It will save your life one day."

  Alek glanced at the divan where the girl's breath was coming in long heartfelt gasps, her breasts undulating, hands flexing, seeking the imposed image of Akisha's fantasy. Alek scowled.

  "Alek."

  "I'm sorry," he said. "She's a little...distracting."

  "There's little I can do about her right now."

  "Are you binding yourself to her?" he asked. He knew that was possible among the oldest and most experienced of the females of his race. In lieu of a male vampire, some could invest their madness in one of their human lovers, let him or her take on the full measure of their madness with usually disastrous repercussions. A messy ordeal, but you did what you had to in the name of survival.

  Good God, I'm thinking like Teresa now, he thought.

  "I haven't decided yet." She stood up smoothly and with hardly any movement at all. "Are you offering?"

  He met her challenging gaze head on, slid the blade of the shir into the scabbard. "I would do anything for you, Akisha," he told her, surprised but not really dismayed by the candid truth of his words.

  She raised one quizzical brow. "Would you now?" She undulated closer to him, slowly extended a hand until the tips of her fingers just brushed his cheek. He touched her hand touching his face, kissed it. Kissed her. Gently at first, but with a growing openness he found oddly comforting to surrender to. Akisha. She was more than a lover. A mother. A nurse. A sensei. He opened his mouth to her in the most intimate of gestures and boldly touched his tongue to her sharp petite eyeteeth.

  She smiled. "My pretty rogue." She kissed him back and her kiss was a curious mixture of pure wicked vampire and motherly affection. Her hand slid slyly under his coat, awakening aches inside of him that had lain dormant for decades. "Promise me. Promise me you'll return. You'll take Empirius's place. You must give me your word as a warrior."

  He hesitated only a moment, drunken on memories and the scrape of Akisha's teeth on the delicate virgin skin of his throat. He could almost feel like a youth again, the thrill of absolute intimacy and the erotic taboo of a woman's tongue. "You have it," he whispered. He lowered his eyes. "If I live that long, that is."

  She tapped his chin with her pointed fingernail as if to gain his attention. She said, thoughtfully, "In `62 I knew a whelp. He had artist's hands and the most gorgeous eyes, like tarns you could fall in and drown in forever. He claimed to have seen the Chronicle, even held it."

  Alek's heart leapt. "Byron?" he ventured.

  "How did
you know?"

  "He was..." He looked away a moment, then back again. "He was Debra's for a while."

  Akisha's black eyes saddened, then sidled over slowly to study the rows and rows of high booked shelves that covered almost one-half of the lounge wall space and the rolling ladder leaning against them.

  "What is it?" he prompted.

  "Byron, he--wait." She stared at the walls of her sanctuary as if to resurrect some half-buried memory. She nodded. "Yes, I'd all but forgotten," she said to herself, the words mysterious and rolling. Her hands dropped away from him and she turned, sensual even in her haste, and headed straightaway for the back of the room.

  14

  The military man bursting with muscles took him from behind and wrapped his powerful tentacle-like arms around Amadeus's shoulders. Great power and constriction. Amadeus felt his breathing hitch to a stop in his chest. The man was very brave, trying to slay a slayer.

  Amadeus released his tension and sagged in his slayer's arms. His head dropped forward, then snapped back up, connecting with his slayer's face. The man screamed as his face was broken like a platter by the contact. Amadeus ground the back of his head against the remnants of his slayer's face. The man's grip loosened and Amadeus took him by the hand. He spun the man around and ratcheted his arm up painfully behind him. The man opened his mouth to scream. With a roar and a burst of controlled strength, Amadeus mule-kicked the creature into the bar, ripping his left arm right out of the socket.

  The wood splintered under the man's fall, the hundreds of ragged daggers of wood impaling him through the eyes and brain like the quills of an acupuncture artist. Blood sprayed Amadeus's face and the tiled floor and blackened the walls farther. The man screamed and screamed and would not die. Amadeus went to him and ground the back of his skull like an old cabbage under his bootheel and the man was silent at last.