Slayer

by Karen Koehler

  Together they descended the stairs to the city.

  The hunt was again on.

  Less than an hour later Alek's back was pressed to the deep alley's flank of the Empress as if he would read the song of her walls. And of all the off-off-Broadway opera houses, he thought, surely she had the darkest of melodies; celebrity and scandal, she was a place of innocent entertainment and calculated political attack.

  He had read somewhere that she'd fed the tabloid well at the turn of the century, back when social angst was as fashionable as padded corsets or Derby hats. She'd petered off after that, gaining a little recognition as something of a sordid vaudeville stage frequented by soldiers on leave during the Second World War. She'd been little better than a boulevard rattrap in the beginning, but she'd transfigured with each transferring of hands. Theatre to museum house to antique emporium to government record house to temporary Department of War Defense outpost. On and on...until she'd come full circle in her cycle.

  Of course she wasn't quite the same. Gone were the hosts of preening, posturing members of society lining her stairwell of crumbling cantilevered stone, the women in fur and jacquard, the cowed husbands in spats who carried canes with beast's heads of real silver, all of them there to see and be seen. Now only the poor and the bored and a handful of aspiring Thespians attended her nightly amateur productions, attracted to her history, perhaps, or only the sinister smile of her cornices.

  The scarred orange brick was cold against his shoulders, stubbornly thick and secretive. Still, if the Chronicle was anywhere it must be here. It had to be here. He looked around tentatively, tried with the whole of his power of sight to feel this derelict Eastside block full of Pakistani grocers and Asian nightclubs and abandoned railyards. A few doors down, in the doorway of a deli, a black man in a tattered green field jacket scalped a roast chicken with enough coke stuffed inside of it to keep the Forty-second District busy for the next three years. Further on a lonely woman in a coldwater flat cried herself to sleep. Alek tried to reach beyond these human tragedies, looking for the supernatural cancer in the body of the city that would indicate a slayer or two.

  So far nothing.

  He felt relieved.

  The bum sleeping behind the meager protection of a Dumpster at the back of the alley turned over and muttered something whiskey-soaked and incomprehensible. Alek ignored the man and tipped his head back against the wall. The stars flitted like stop-signals in and out of sight through the choking blanket of nighttime smog overhead. "Nothing," he whispered. "I think we have enough time if we don't dawdle. Maybe."

  Teresa said nothing, only gazed up at the abused cornices with their wicked Corinthian relief as if she were wondering about its secrets the same as he. She breathed in deeply, taking the air and all the data it carried in through her sensitive Jacobson's organ, seeing the unseeable the same as he, but with a process more natural than he was used to. Finally she said, "You dread this game, caro, yes?"

  "I'd like to dig Byron up and kill him again. Yeah," he muttered. "I'd also like to get my ass down to Port Authority and get a one-way ticket on the longest line out." He rubbed his arms nervously and started out after her retreating figure. "But I guess we need that goddamn book first."

  He got no answer from her and expected none.

  They followed the antique iron guardrail to the back stoop stage entrance. And there they encountered a punk heavy dressed in a tuxedo that looked scarcely able to hold in the force of the man's raw gym muscle. Tux reached out and thumped the plain of his palm over Alek's chest, halting him. His piggy eyes shrank still more in his ruddy, bald face. His bicycle mohawk stood up proud and blue like the quills of a particularly threatening and unusual porcupine. He eyed Alek with contempt. "No way. No one goes back there without a pass. `Specially not bag people like you, you read, homeless? Soup kitchen's down da avenue."

  Alek looked down at the hand holding him back. A colorful viper tattoo meandered along its meaty back, lending a dazzling three-dimensional illusion of the snake creeping out of Tux's sleeve. He thought absently of Erebus, another hulk of a creature, and the damage he usually had to deal the man to get past. Should he fear this then, he wondered, this colorful character with his big words and bad judgment? His hand came up, ready to snatch and break the man's arm, to tear his hand off at the wrist if he had to. Because he could. Because, really, this was the only way to deal with these types.

  But in the end he stopped and dropped his hand, remembering Teresa's glamour, the spell so easily woven by her. The power that protected them from Amadeus's all-seeing eyes in her nest, the power that had beaten back even Takara's illusions enough for Teresa to plant her knife in the slayer's belly. Alek turned his eyes up into the punk's face. "Please," he said, gaining an impression of the man's ill-defined anger being artistically channeled into this bizarre job. "We need to go inside."

  "Wassamatta, you stupid? Scram. Don't make me angry..."

  Alek narrowed his eyes. Anger. Anger was innocent death, the broken chain before its time, anger was a thousand voices calling for the blood of Aragon, a monster, a man made god by the church and unchained among the weaker masses like a wolf among sheep. Anger was the covenant sealed between creature and creator when all the vows were nullified. Anger was a strike to the face, not wounding but as sharp as a drawn sword...

  Tux fell back, untounched, against the back stage door and slumped down, leaving the way completely open for them. Alek stepped over the man and into the wings. The expression on his face might have been religious agony, but Alek did not look close enough to know for certain.

  20

  Twenty minutes after his blackout (the beer; it was the beer and the fucking hot suit) Richie Bellini was back on his feet and hitting the skinny blonde duck with the bad makeup job square it the chest with two fingers and telling him to piss off if he knew what was good for him. Bone-headed bums. When were they gonna learn that the Empress wasn't a country club for the homeless?

  The kid in the long black coat with the long yellow hair looked down at the fingers in his chest, looked hack up at Richie. Like so many punks today, he had smart-ass, fuck-me-why-don't-you eyes. Snowy grey, they were, almost pale. Albino? No. Binnies had pink little bunny eyes. Didn't they?

  "Don't touch me," the kid whispered.

  Ooooh, a real badass, this one. Yeah, uh-huh. Richie Bellini, in the long course of his illustrious career as gypsy, roadie, punk and brawler, had bounced bigger fish than this one, and he knew for certain he was going to have one righteous time roughing over this kindergarten brat. He put on his ugly bulldog face and sneered, "You just hustle ass outta here, buddy. You hear me, asshole? Go home to bed before your mommy and daddy come looking for you." He punctuated each word with a good, hard threatening prod of his fingers.

  The kid continued to stare down at Richie's fingers. "Never...touch...me," said the kid, his whiny, nasal Bronx voice digressing into an upper-lip-raising snarl the likes of which Richie had only ever heard from a well-tempered vintage Hog engine set to run. Richie saw the kid's pearly little teeth, and for just a sec he thought maybe the kid was an extra with tonight's troupe--except Richie knew that the Bard was on the run tonight--R&J and not the Scottish Play--and that the guys inside weren't in need of anybody who looked like he'd just dug himself out of his own midnight grave.

  What was it with these brats today?

  Richie was just about to take the kid by the collar of his really cute Dracula coat and high-fly him out into the street (couldn't weigh that much, the kid; pathetic; anemic, from the look of him) when a hand as long and pale as a latex glove clamped down over Richie's wrist and suddenly burst apart the knob of little wrist bones.

  The kid laughed like a maniac as the viper's wedgelike head was severed from the rest of its body. Richie felt only surprise at the sight. In all his years as a road warrior and then a heavy--and God knew there were plenty years there--he'd never come up against a punk that was so white and ridiculously thin and so dammed
strong...

  Or so looney-tunes, either.

  Richie meant to laugh this off like everything else, though what came out was really more like a good, healthy scream of pure, unadulterated terror. A distant part of Richie's brain considered that in his whole forty years he'd never screamed like a pansy before and that his reputation was good and ruined now.

  But then Richie's pride was saved when the kid cut off his scream by dragging Richie toward a wolfish open mouth whose stage teeth were far, far too real.

  "Where are we?" Alek asked.

  "Beneath the orchestra pit, I believe." Teresa studied the map by the muted light of the sole bulb shining in the center of the ancient, musty womb that passed for the Empress's prop cellar. "God but I think I agree with you. I'd like to kill the bastard again myself."

  "Paranoid."

  "What?"

  "Byron was paranoid. That's why he did this."

  Paranoid. Like I am.

  Alek unsheathed his sword and went to hover at the bottom of the cellar steps down which they had come, testing the weight of the new sword in his hand, learning its contours in the dark. At its top landing the door was sensibly closed. Beyond it, actors' muffled voices were natural and even. Feet stomped to the natural rhythms of script. A drummer hit a bass drum in dramatic fashion, the sound like muffled, far-off thunder.

  He glanced around the cramped space, the sawhorses and busts and pasteboard weaponry and racks of moldering costumes. Here, below, he tried to tell himself, there was nothing to fear but an avenging army of dustbunnies.

  Alek shivered, put a foot upon the stairs.

  "Someone coming?" Teresa asked him.

  "Or I'm just spooked."

  She moved wordlessly to one wall, brutally shoved aside a clothes rack, and put the tips of her fingers against its plastered face. "Here."

  He checked the cellar door again, saw only a thin inbleeding of light around the edges. He sheathed the sword, then went to the wall, touched it. "Drywall."

  "Can you break it?"

  He nodded. "Have you read it right?"

  "I'm certain."

  "But shouldn't there be a regression here?"

  "Perhaps they've plastered it. For aesthetics."

  His voice sounded thin and desperate, too old and far too young at the same time. And why anyone would worry the appearance of a cellar was a mystery to him, but saying it was over would be giving up and giving in, wouldn't it? Instead, Alek went to the place she had indicated and pressed his palms flat to the wall. He gathered his strength, sensed the broken grain and the living chitter of mice behind the skin-thin barrier, and pushed--

  Plaster crackled, rivering through with fissures, and fell into depressions as plaster powder wintered the chilly air. A piece like a massive jigsaw came away in his hand and he felt his heart skip a beat, then stop altogether. This was it. This was the place, damnit.

  He punched through the exposed stud, felt the satisfying crack and splinter of decades-old dry wood. He put his hand into the hole he had made, felt around, then removed it; it came out of the crevice in a shaking, powdery fist. Flagstone.

  He touched it, incredulous. "Christ. Why would a theatre company flagstone their fucking cellar? What the hell kind of thinking is that?"

  Teresa was silent a long, dark moment. Then she sighed as if from the bottom of her very soul, the sound eerie and resonant in this close place. "They wouldn't," she said. "But the government with its banks of wartime secrets would."

  "Fuck!" He punched a second bowling-ball-sized hole in the stud next to its sister, did not feel the hurt though his hand bled. He leaned against the wall, closed his eyes against a headache he suddenly couldn't shake.

  "There is still one more possibility. Let us waste no more time among this mockery." She turned, graceful and maddeningly calm, and began to ascend the steps.

  "You weren't planning on leaving without sayin' goodbye, were you, man?" Sean called from his vantage point on the metal catwalk circumventing the backstage. Alek looked up, already anticipating the sight of the punk's grinning eyes and saluting sword, anticipating them the way someone might a badly reoccurring dream complete with closets and bogeyman.

  He did not expect the body, however. It fell bonelessly to the floor at Alek's feet, fell like a sack of potatoes with exactly that much life and weight to it. Perhaps it had been human at one time. It was difficult to tell. It just looked like a train-wreck victim with a blue mohawk now.

  Alek danced back a step, out of the widening pool of viscous mixed fluids.

  The little shit smiled down at them. He put his free hand on the safety rail. Then, hardly putting any pressure on it at all, he leapt over the edge of the catwalk and landed in a crouch and a little whoof of air, one hand flat to the rutted oak floor, the other bearing the weight of his sword readily to his inner arm.

  His sword? thought Alek. My sword. The little bastard...

  The backstage being an abandoned junkyard of cables and stacked sawhorses and carpentry and mechanical tools, no one was there to notice Sean's grand Shakespearean entry. Not the actors, off in the wings watching the play, nor the propmasters who were also the actors.

  The eyes of the Stone Man narrowed to bloodless silver blades. Madness there--worse, sane hatred.

  Alek stepped back, almost mincing.

  In response, Stone Man straightened up, a six-foot tinkering tower of merciless bone and steel and squealing paten leather. He moved differently. Alek saw that at once. He had that loose-limbed liquid grace one only found in some of the oldest and best-trained warriors. The catlike beauty of a born predator, a born slayer. He twisted his head unnaturally, like an amphibian catching a fly, and flicked his tongue out at them. "Miss me?"

  Teresa edged sideways toward the wings.

  Sean licked his lips and smiled at her. "You look delicious, babe. I hope you've got some pussy left over, 'cause after I'm done cutting up your boyfriend here I'll be all yours!" He laughed out a riot of obscene snuffling, choking noises.

  Alek drew his sword. Takara's tasseled, feather-light wakizashi felt about as much protection as a large kitchen knife. "You want to cut me, you little shit?"

  Sean grinned obligingly. "Whatever you want and wherever you want it, you said. Well, I want it here. I want it now!"

  "Careful what you wish for," Alek whispered.

  Sean lunged, made a cross-handed slice meant to take a few dozen layers of skin off Alek's face. Alek sidestepped him and tried to roll the punk off his shoulder.

  He'd always been better in close-up--the curse of the long-limbed. It wasn't the advantage most thought it was. Even a endlessly-legged spider winds up its prey, Amadeus once taught him. And it was that lesson he tried to use. But something happened this time.

  Sean caught himself before the throw, swung his blade around so he was inside Alek's swordarm. Alek changed tactics at the last moment, met Sean's blade with his own as it came back around, skidded off it too quickly in his imbalance and heard the tell-tale screek of his blade breaking against the tyranny of Hanzo's blessed sword. It stole the pathetically light Japanese dicer from his grip and the meat from his hand. Alek dropped to the floor and rolled out of the way of Sean's crosswise strokes.

  Blood on the floorboards now, too bright and too real in this place of makeup and make-believe.

  Sean's whinnying filled the wings like the roar of summertime thunder, undercutting the beat of the bass onstage.

  "First blood," Alek whispered, finding his feet and binding his hand with the belt off his coat.

  Sean came at him again, swinging his sword like a kid up to bat. Alek flattened himself against the floor under the assault of the swing, dove for Sean's middle. Sean hit the floor on his back with a graceless ooff! of breath.

  Sean twisted around, was on him inside a moment, no quarter given, no punches pulled, real streetfighter mode this time, all clawing fingernails and snapping teeth. A fist landed on Alek's mouth, another on his cheek, blackening his vision. He s
hook himself, and when he could see again the sight that greeted him was hackle-raising--Sean looming--the mouth cranking open impossibly far--the cobralike incisors snapping closed around his throat like a collar. Christ, he'd been practicing. He was using what was at hand. He was getting good--

  Sean thrashed like a Rottweiler with a chunk of meat in its jaws.

  Alek gasped, heard the material of his coat collar snarl, felt his flesh perforate between the shredder of Sean's jaws. Good, so good--but no master. Not yet. Alek snarled, the sound guttural with the blood bubbling out of his nostrils and foaming through the corners of his mouth, and brought his hands together in a thunderclap over Sean's ears. There came a muffled pop as air was forced down both Sean's ear canals. It shot his equilibrium to hell. The wolftrap loosened around Alek's throat and Alek, choking, gasping, finally able to breathe something other than blood, pushed out at his slayer.

  They went over like a pair of wrestling alligators locked in a deathroll. Harnessing momentum like once he had beneath Wilma Bessell's assault, Alek launched the Stone Man off himself. Sean flew back into a sawhorse and destroyed it utterly. He groaned, sat up. He looked, for wont of a better analogy, simply pissed. He let out his breath in a hiss, got to his feet, shaky but not defeated, and began to circle Alek like a jungle cat searching for a weakness in its intended prey.

  Alek found his feet and watched the Stone Man circle around him, keeping a dozen paces between them at all times, keeping Sean always to the front of him. "You're good," Alek spat bloodily upon the floor. "But you're still a dickless little whelp."

  Sean lifted his sword. With a wet, frothy snarl, he flicked it at Alek's head like a circus dagger.

  Alek used his coat to deaden the blow of the blade. The sword clattered down no more than a half dozen feet from the toe of his boot. He tried to grab it up but the sword skittered suddenly, animatedly, out of his reach.