Slayer

by Karen Koehler

  Debra sat up and sought out the stranger's eyes. And almost at once Alek felt the icy rime of her distrust and heard her stony voice in his mind which said there was no room in their world but for him and her. She turned her face into him. I want to go away, Alek. Take us far away.

  We have nowhere to go, Debra.

  Come with me, children, said the priest in their private language, and go with your own kind. And go into the open, waiting arms of the Coven.

  Alek narrowed his eyes. "The Coven?"

  The priest shrugged. "Is everything. Sanctification. Redemption. Everything."

  Redemption. Alek knew what that word meant: forgiveness, for Debra and for himself, for allowing them to slip so far into the dark.

  The man uncurled one of his hands like a gift. "It must be your decision."

  The man was a priest. A Father.

  "And you could be my son," he said, "if you so wish it."

  Alek watched as his hand came off Debra's face and was slowly devoured by whiteness. He felt a chill in his blood at the contact that burned him as deep as a vow.

  And then the priest pulled them easily from the stage and down into the darkness of his coat. And as a new fierceness of midwinter's snow began to fall he raised the loose, swirling folds of that coat and covered their heads against it as though it was a dark wing under which he had taken them.

  Amadeus, Priest-warrior.

  Amadeus, Covenmaster.

  Magician.

  His house was a magic castle walled in books and glowing with holy light and the perfumes of beeswax and incense, where the pasts of his people seemed to crumble away, and where each day was a step in some hallowed stairwell which might take them to the Godhead itself one day. In the Covenhouse rooms seemed to gather themselves and stand starkly powerful around the lone individual, not frightening but surely full of years and history. The cells of the great house were like spare, individual statements of the soul, and the Great Abbey itself was like some lost temple out of a forgotten mythology.

  But best of all, in the Covenhouse, no one asked about your sins.

  "Who are you?" Alek asked quite suddenly at Amadeus's feet where the ancient man was seated in one of his straight-backed benches. Alek had been working up the courage to ask the question since the very first day, almost a week ago. And now, at last, he felt the courage break free from him and direct his words.

  Amadeus stopped reading his ancient words from out of his Catechism, his fingers pausing in the middle of the page where they had been following the old scrawled inking. His blind eyes turned downward as if he could really see Alek there beside his sister and the other new kid, the one called Booker who never spoke very much. "A pilgrim, child," he answered.

  Alek sat up, enchanted by this new discovery. "Like on the Mayflower?"

  Amadeus smiled.

  At his side, Debra turned her face away and began to sulk once more, not at all impressed by this wonderfully old young man. Stupid of her.

  "And before, Father Amadeus?"

  "Before what?"

  "Before you were a Pilgrim."

  "A pilgrim I have always been, my curious one." He turned the page. It was all he had offered and it was magic and amazing and Alek did not ask again.

  "I hate him!" Debra shouted that night, her fists balled in her hair, her filmy red gown billowing under her sublime wrath. "There's something wrong with him."

  Alek glared up sharply from the Catechism that Amadeus had lent him to read; it was the history of the Coven, explaining the origins of its Rites and ordinances, its purposes and designs, the vampire's relationship with the church and each other, all of it interesting. He turned up the oil lamp on the table beside the fascinating little book as Debra paced past, her hair writhing.

  "They're dark," she complained miserably. She did not pause, not even a moment, like a lioness in a cage.

  "What's dark?" she asked with teetering patience.

  "His eyes."

  "His eyes are light."

  She paced.

  He wants me to die.

  Alek scowled up at her. "The Coven doesn't slay their own."

  "They slay their mad."

  "Amadeus doesn't think you're mad!"

  "They hate their women."

  Alek heisted. "They hate the unbound, Debra."

  "So I have to be bound?"

  "The Father said, that in time, maybe Booker--"

  But she spun around too quickly, one hand darting out to strike the Catechism from the table. She struck the oil lamp by accident instead. The light guttered out, and almost at once the entire table was awash in hot oil.

  "Debra!" he growled. "Debra, damnit, look what you've done!" He peeled the ancient book off the table. It dripped despondently, and its words, in ink and sometimes in blood, were quickly running into nonsense on its pages.

  "I hate him!" Debra shouted. "And I hate you for bringing us here!"

  "What was I supposed to do? Where were we supposed to go?"

  Debra crumpled down onto their bed, weeping.

  Why was she acting like this, this way, now that they finally had a permanent home? Now that he had a permanent home? Or was that it? he wondered. Was she jealous because he was the center of Amadeus's attention instead of her? Because Amadeus said he saw great power and potential in Alek? It wasn't fair; damnit, why was she spoiling his one chance to be happy?

  With a little sigh of impatience he set the ruin of the book aside and went to her as he had always done and she clung to him and wept to him as if they were still all alone in the world, her hands desperate claws on his back, her face buried in the hollow of his throat. And then her cold lips rasped apart and he felt the familiar dent of her teeth on his flesh.

  But bloodtaking was wrong. The Catechism said so. Amadeus said so. A priest had discipline and controlled the beast instead of letting it control him. Amadeus said they were all of two minds and that when you fell too far sometimes you couldn't come back. And then you were lost forever. That's why discipline was so important.

  And so Alek moved her face down against the breast of the habit the Father had given him. Debra struggled against him, but he did not relent until she tired and stilled and slept in his arms.

  Alek put her to bed and pulled the handmade eiderdown quilt around her, gave her her Andy doll to hold. He kissed her piously on the forehead, then stepped back to watch the gray dolphin light float over her deceptively innocent-looking face. The light paled her skin, made her hair look brittle and ancient. Alek shuddered, feeling for just a moment that he was looking on the face of the unburied dead.

  "Debra, what do I do with you?"

  He picked up the Catechism and, wearily, a little fearfully, he went to find Amadeus and apologize.

  The Father was meditating in the shadow of the altar of skulls when Alek found him, a wreath of serpents crawling around his neck, but not biting, never that. He didn't seem at all angry when he found out what had become of his book. He nodded. "It is time," he said only, and the sightless eyes set on Alek's face seemed to sink into some other place that Alek could not fathom, could not follow. As he watched, Amadeus rose and moved to one of the sets of crosswords and took down a katana longsword from off its moor. And then the Covenmaster knelt with him, one hand on the ornately-carved ivory hilt, the other on Alek's face.

  "This sword," said Amadeus, "was forged by the first jonin, or ninja-master, Hattori Hanzo, and was blessed by the great Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu. It is a virgin; it has never been used in battle. It is said that its master would live forever and rule the earth for a thousand years. And it is said the weapon would know its master when it met him and the two would be forged together for all time."

  Alek looked down at the impressive forty-inch weapon and saw his own amazed eyes reflected in the flawless blade of the sword. Such art, such hungry art. He wondered what power had ordained him worthy of this great thing and was about to ask when he was silenced by the reflected image of the Covenmaster in the swor
d. Amadeus's eyes narrowed, pale as fired steel, sharp as the deadliest summer lightning. His hand coursed down over Alek's face like rain, touching his brow, closing Alek's eyes and caressing his lids so gently that he did not recoil.

  "Truth is brewed in darkness, Alek. This is your first lesson."

  Alek nodded, lost in Amadeus's created night. It was like pleasure without pain, like pain without the regret. It was like Debra's sacred kiss transfigured into a touch, a thought, a place of thoughts, deep and intimate, both alien and hauntingly familiar. And in that personal night his hands were captured and set around the hard bonelike hilt of Hanzo's sacred sword.

  "Make it a part of you forever, Alek, my Chosen One."

  He tried to lift it, but it was so impossibly heavy. "I can't, Father..."

  "You will. I will show you how and you will, my son."

  Afterward, even as he slept in Debra's embrace, he felt the throbbing presence of the sword under his bed and heard the Father's last words to him that day echo down deeply into his subconscious like a promise or a prayer.

  I will create you.

  And five years later, he had.

  16

  "Alek Knight."

  He opened his eyes almost immediately; almost immediately he sucked in a breath of cold, stale air. "Debra?" He wanted to reach for the angelic face floating above him, to touch it, but curiously enough, he hadn't any arms or hands to do so.

  "Not Debra."

  "Teresa."

  "Yes."

  He smiled drunkenly. "I'm dead."

  "Then I must be as well."

  He frowned at the faulty logic of that.

  "Alive," she said and kissed his forehead with her sweet, innocent little prostitute's mouth. "Alive."

  Her face was so perfect and unnatural and he so wanted to touch it and make her real to him once more. But where were his hands?

  "I can't move," he complained.

  "Your back is broken."

  "Paralyzed."

  "For a time."

  He frowned at the news; it seemed frowning was all he could manage. "How?"

  "You fell. I watched you."

  "You were there...?"

  "I stood helplessly by the banks of the Hudson and watched you fall. I took you down to the docks, and from there--here."

  He tried to turn his head, to see what this place was, but that was too much. "Where's here?"

  "A safe place I've brought you to hide you. He won't find you here. Even Amadeus the Mad does not know this city as I do."

  He saw a jungle of colorless waterpipes and shattered plaster in cookie-cutter patterns, cobwebs like shorn, ancient ghosts, or silk. He smelled old water and rust and the musty befurred things which moved busily in the walls. Above came the gentle clapping of things with blunt nighttime wings. They were in the attic space of some old coldwater brownstone, he was willing to wager, but as to where in the city, if indeed they were even still in the city, was anyone's guess...

  "How long...?"

  "A long time, Alek Knight. Three days and you've slept them through. How do you feel?"

  "I don't."

  She leaned over him and kissed his mouth, and it was terrible for he could not feel the essence of her breath on his dead traitor of a body. He heard from far down below, somewhere in the belly of the building, a roar of voices suddenly. Anger. Human anger. Something shattered against a wall, and then there were more oaths and cries of violence. Yet he could not force himself to concentrate on them.

  He was lying on a mattress or cot of some kind, Teresa's cot, he surmised, with Teresa hovering near, her flesh white and bare to his touch. Her voice, her scent--they seemed to raise his sensitivity until the room itself throbbed with painfully acute life. He saw something long and slender flash in her delicate hands, and for a moment he thought he was doomed. But then "It's time to heal," she whispered in her Jezebel's voice and she pressed the edge of the straight razor she held in a brimming black line between her breasts as if what she offered him was death and not life itself. Carefully, through her persuasions, he kissed her flesh and tasted her angel's blood, felt it fill and begin to heal the ruined shell of his body.

  So good. But he was so tired. His mouth slackened early, his body relaxing on the meager mattress beneath him and slowly filling with the things he'd thought he'd forgotten--warmth and chill and dull, wretched pain--as his body came alive around him to torture him for his reckless abuse of it.

  He shuddered violently and tried to reach for her. "Teresa..."

  "Shh." He felt her kiss his bloodstained lips. "Sleep and grow strong, my beautiful lost one." Her lips kissed his eyelids to closing and in time he slept. And when his dreams and memories came once more they were only of her.

  "I dreamt things," Alek said when next he awoke to the sounds of violent activity below. He looked around the attic space and found her sitting in a rocker beside his sickbed. On a table between them were packages of vendor's food wrapped in white paper and string. Like Elijah's raven she had brought him something to eat and helped him sit up now to do so. He sagged like a stringless puppet against the headboardless wall, his body a nest of tingling points of pain.

  "You're better," Teresa said. "What did you dream?"

  Through a white haze of dust her face was ghastly, perfect, beautiful. White skin, black eyes, black, black hair, her delicate body now hidden away by an unidentifiable sheath of some ancient cloth. It looked medieval, or it was only the fact that she wanted it to. Her glamour. He wanted so to touch her and make her real in all her dangerous allure, and to his surprise he found he could. Every gesture of his fingers on her hair and face was an agony, but the pain was fine; nothing felt worst than feeling nothing at all. "We were walking on Fifth Avenue in the daylight," he said groggily, "and it was spring." He smiled with precision. "All the old Greek vendors were selling their tulips. And I bought you--"

  "An ice cream cone," she said. "And I ate it."

  He frowned. "You can't remember another's dreams."

  "Another's, no. But yours I see." She kissed his hand, licked the tips of his fingers like a fawning pet. "I see it the way you've dreamt it, just like I see what became of your unfortunate friend."

  Akisha, ancient Akisha...

  "Yes, caro," she said, "I know. Slain by the hand of Amadeus."

  Dear God, Akisha--but he'd never meant--

  "Yes, I know."

  He erupted into shameless, uncontrollable sobs then, and she allowed for it, cradled his face to her perfumed hair. She stroked his face and let his tears baptize her with their purity, and when it was finished and his grief weak and used up she eased him back as carefully as if he was some fragile, valuable old doll.

  She leaned forward, her gown rustling, and wiped a tear from his cheek. "And now?" she prompted.

  "Nothing." He shook his head. "It's all been in vain."

  "No. Byron's picture. We have a map to the Chronicle."

  He laughed miserably. "We have nothing, Teresa."

  But her smile was clever and ancient and seductive, as always. "We have you."

  It took him a moment to understand what she meant. "I can't," he said at last. "I can't do that."

  Down below something crashed against a wall and a woman screamed.

  "You will," she said.

  The paper she found in the scattered debris of the boiler room was really a sprawling flier for the 1993 Coney Island Oktoberfest. He turned the aged flier to its blank-faced side on the slate she'd propped against his knees. He looked at it, its desolate whiteness, tried to picture Byron's map there, its simple, exact artwork. Simple, so simple, yet one wrong stroke would skew the whole damned thing out of focus. He took a pen from his breast pocket, put it to the paper, stopped.

  "I can't do this," he repeated. "I can't fucking draw apples anymore."

  "You must," Teresa told him, standing in her medieval gown, her black eyes watching him with a determination that was godlike in its absolute purity.

  "I'm a h
ack, Teresa," he whispered the awful truth.

  "You are a gifted artist. A Bauhaus in your violent soul."

  "I don't believe you."

  "Try." Her eyes narrowed, saying other things the nature of which he wished he could pretend did not exist. Do it, her eyes said, do it or you will not walk out of here alive, slayer.

  Alek thought of the straight razor, hidden away here somewhere in her loft. He lifted the pen and put it to the paper once more. His hand trembled, the pen almost too much weight for it to bear as dozens of lifeless Bosch jobs flitted through his mind. Dank. Useless. Hopeless...

  "Then was then," she uttered softly as she took her seat beside the bed. "Now is now..."

  Now, this thing now, his magnum opus, his greatest work, the one that would hang in no gallery on no wall, would gain no coverage, no criticism, would be seen by no one. The work that might save their lives if not their souls. This then. Well, all right.

  He caught his breath, put his pen to paper and began to draw. "Talk to me," he muttered, "tell me things to keep me sane."

  "Such as...?"

  "Anything. Anything at all."

  She was silent a moment. Her eyes glowed white in the dark, and then blinked out. And then she said, "I arrived in this city almost thirty years ago, but it might as well be yesterday, or tomorrow. I had never been away from the convent until then, but survival has a way of educating you in the ways of the world, doesn't it? Paris was dead by then, of course, and so I had no protection. I soon found as well that I had nothing to offer the city but my eternal youth and body, both of which were greedily accepted. I slept in Grand Central Station my first day in town and sold myself the following night in order to get up enough money to afford a room at a flophouse.

  "I didn't think much about what I was doing, just did it and took their life and their money, used to lending out my body for a few sweaty moments in Rome, and returning to it later, when the beast was satiated. The priests had trained me well for the life I was to lead. The only difference between the assembly line of eager men who wanted me and the priests at the Vatican was that if I left them alive I never had to see the men again.