No!
Again he went for it; again the sword jumped like a living thing back toward Sean, making Alek feel ridiculously like a victim of a Charlie Chaplin short, the Derby hat that always seemed to get away and all that. Sean laughed hysterically at the sight and clapped his hands together.
Alek hunched forward, ignoring the heckling, all his concentration on Hanzo's blade, the engravings he knew so well, the storytelling he could feel even now in the palm of his hand. The sword jittered nervously, tried to skip away, being drawn as it was by Sean's mental persuasions. But it wasn't his, goddamn it! You should never have been parted from it, came Akisha's whisper. The sword will know its master, said the swordmaster Amadeus.
You know me! You belong to me...!
He threw himself down on the floor, reaching for the hilt, reaching for it the way a child might reach for a particularly shy pet, reaching for it with his hands and his mind and his heart. Reaching--almost--
"Shit-fuck!"
--the sword bucked away from him as his fingertips brushed the pommel. Alek jumped to his feet and let out a roar of frustration as the sword slithered away, kicking up sparks on the buckled hardwood floor, sliding with uncanny ease into the mold of Sean's hand. Then Sean was on his feet, laughing riotously, leaping at him, sending him reeling backward through the stage curtain, the whelp screaming laughter--
Romeo was onstage, enraged by the recent death of his friend Mercutio, and was rushing his evil cousin Tybalt with drawn sword when the two slayers broke through the curtain. Romeo's pasteboard sword glanced off of Alek's shoulder and bent like a rabbit ear as he and Sean broke between them and cut a jagged, crazed line toward the stage apron proper. Tybalt swore, his face crumpling in angst at their blatant upstaging, and tried to take ahold of Sean's arm and drag him off the stage.
It was Tybalt's mistake. Laughing still, grinning all the while, Sean dragged his sword back over his right shoulder, cleared Tybalt's head from his shoulders like a man knocking an apple off a barrel. Blood gushed.
"Oops," giggled Sean, "dropped something, man."
Alek hissed like a cat, like the blood loosened from the stump of the man's neck. "Bassstard..."
Sean grinned at him with surprise, shook off the headless body clinging to him, kicked it into the orchestra pit, sending down a rain of blood like anointment on the heads of those in the first two rows. "Like you ain't?" He chopped at Alek with the murderous sword.
Alek recoiled, skating the blood and the metal cables of the stage, jumping nimbly away from the silver whistle of death falling across his throat. Sean's second slice caught Romeo at the side of his head as the actor was turning to run, shaving away a portion of his cheek it a flap and exposing his molars on the left side. Romeo screamed out of his mouth and out of the side of his face.
Blood painted Alek's face like makeup, blinded him: Tybalt's, Romeo's, his own. The floorboards under his feet were iced with split blood. He stumbled out of the path of Sean's downward assault, sensed the floor skating out from under him. He went down, the back of his skull cracking against the iron stand of a strobe light.
Darkness poured in, but the house was white with silence, and through it all Alek felt the crashing peal of laughter and the whicker of a quick overhand strike, a finishing strike, the coup de grace--
Faster than the human eye could see or follow it, almost faster than he could, he took the strobe's stem in his hands and blindly wrenched it forward like a shield. Steel glanced off iron and made the strobe sing in Alek's hands, sent the vibration and the heat of the poisonous metal shooting through his hands and all the way down to his elbows. He threw the strobe stiffly away, his hands burning cold. Above, somewhere amidst all the darkness, Sean was howling like a wounded animal. Alek tossed his bead, shook away the remaining darkness, and saw--
The Stone Man was on his knees at the end of the stage, the sword forgotten, his hands sheltering the portion of his face which had suffered the sword's ricochet. His bottom lip had been shaved off, his nose neatly spinxed. Sean tossed back his head of blood-washed blonde hair and screeched deafeningly like some damned beast out of the Abyss. The clamshell lights rimming the apron crackled and spat in winks of bursting blue light and pungent ozone, then went dark. Cables came alive and twisted like tentacles around the props. The backdrop split and fell away like flesh from its border of studs. With a final little cry Sean tipped sideways over the edge of the orchestra pit and was gone.
Shaking as if with palsy, numb beyond pain, almost beyond terror, Alek dragged himself up in the midst of the blood and the carnage, the war and the strange silence. He squinted out at the audience through the smoky violet lighting and weaved with confusion and disbelief when the audience begun, slowly, to applaud. The sound redoubled his shuddering like a leaf in a tempest. Idiots. Did they think this was a performance? Part of the fucking play? Something flambant neuf? He felt sick. Sick to death. Sick almost to the point of passing out.
From behind him came the rusted bells of saneless laughter.
He turned around, slowly, dreading this now, dreading it...
Slowly the Stone Man emerged from the pit, a horrorshow of scored tissue and awry bloody hair. The remnants of his nose hung like beaten meat from his face. His left eye was gone, the socket swollen with a yellow fluid as thick as curdled cream. Still he grinned, slinking up onto the stage like a serpent from out of its warren. "They love me, jelly bean," he garbled. "I was born for the stage...and my face"--he touched the ruined red soup of his face--"my face is my fortune!" He screamed laughter.
It was too much; Alek backed away toward the end of the stage. Mad. Sean was mad. The Coven was mad. Maybe their whole fucking race was mad.
"Don't go, jelly bean!" Sean cried as he climbed to his feet on the stage, weaved as he turned to face the appreciative audience and the falling flowers, and swept downward in an elaborate bow which liberated the fragment of his nose from the rest of his face. "They haven't seen our encore yet!"
Encore. It took Alek a moment to realize what Sean meant. The audience had risen in an ovation, most of them punks and goths and straights with weird taste in theatre to be sure, but among them only two figures were moving. Moving toward the stage. Quickly--
Aristotle. Robot...
Alek ran. Velvet curtains crashed away as he ran, ran from this boogeyman made of steel and bone and blood. Ran from the slayers closing the distance between them. He ran, mindlessly, like an animal sensing death, ran blind, numb to all feeling but one, but terror--hair-raising, bone-cold, all-consuming terror--and there, in the wings, amidst a crushing group of buffeting, baffled performers in elaborate Veronan dress, Alek tripped and sprawled flat on the floor and did not move. It was enough. He was so tired, so damned fucking tired...
"So full of despair, are you? You said we would always be together. Did you lie, beloved?" came a seductive little voice out of the darkness for him. Through a mosaic of tears he saw red; Debra had come back for him at last. Lie? He had done many, many things, most of them horrible, but he had never lied to her. Never in all his years. He promised to love her forever. He promised. She took him by the hand, and when she tugged at him he rose up as if on invisible wires.
His vision mottled, then cleared. Not Debra. Teresa. Oh not again. He wanted to stop, to shake her and scream into her face. She was cheating. She always cheated and tricked him. But he was flying with her over the floor and through the door and out into the night, and now he remembered why, remembered what waited for him beyond that curtain of terror.
Together they left behind the stoop and the theatre and all the horror, and it was a headlong, pounding rush for the mouth of the alley which let out onto a real world, a world where vendors finagled and pickpockets did their thing, where prices were inflated and money depressed, where the world was being carried down into hell on the arms of its political leaders and where there was no place for laughing demi-vampires and mad covens and elusive Chronicles.
The place of the mor
tal and the alive.
21
So they were being followed.
And for the first time, probably since ever, Alek realized that were this not New York City, you'd almost think it was ten in the morning instead of ten at night. The sidewalks were full of people, walking from parking lots towards the glamorous lights of Broadway, or making their way toward the bars and restaurants that ran in storefront chains up and down the streets. Among them, all but invisible to their eyes, or to those hungering for what they had to offer, stood those selling illicit wares, illegal substances, sex, maybe arms, putting on their lines, sometimes snagging a respectable-looking passerby. As he walked these same streets with Teresa, being as casual as his look allowed, it amazed him to realize how many ordinary people burned with unmentionable desires.
I will leave one day, he thought solemnly, I will go away but it will not be me going. I will be somebody else when that fateful day arrives. Because if I went, I would die. And he wondered how many others owned such an obtrusive thought-loop. But there was no way he could stay here if he failed to find the Chronicle, no way at all. And yet he would, winner of failure. Because for all the grime and underlying violence, this was his city. And he had absolutely nowhere to go. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
They waited at the light, staying back in the shadows of a bank building, prepared to make a left on Forty-second Street on their way home. Teresa's home, rather. A block away rose the corner of the high-rise housing Covenant House, its facade lit with flood lamps like a beacon to runaways everywhere. Alek remembered that about a decade earlier it's founder, Father Bruce Ritter, was accused of having sex with several male youths. He resigned amidst scandal and disappeared from the public eye without being prosecuted. And without ever being seen again.
The church took care of its own.
The light changed but he made no move up Forty-second. "They're here," he said and Teresa turned, looking for all the world like any other streetcorner girl. But for her eyes. Her crystal-gleaming, night-piercing eyes. He saw her stiffen and knew she'd seen it as well. The slight rush amidst the crowd, the bit of turmoil as figures waded through, cutting a skirmish line to the front.
Goddamnit.
The light had turned to red again, and now the slayers emerged fully to the fore of the waiting crowd. Two of them. The one was petite, male, with a sly, bespeckled, foxlike face and nancy-boy features. Aristotle. The other, Robot, also male, would have been as nondescript as a balding, middle-aged banker in shades and coat were it not for his sheer size. The man stood half a foot taller than Alek's six feet. had biceps as big around as Alek's thigh and outweighed him by more than sixty pounds. His black wool coat, as it were, looked ready to split at the seams from the sheer muscled bulk and hidden hardware the man carried. Both Aristotle and Robot turned to look on him at the same moment. Robot's expression was unreadable, as always. Totty smiled ever so slightly with only his eyes and moved aside to accommodate the third member of their little unholy trinity.
Stone Man.
He must have changed his bloody coat, raped some poor fool of blood to accelerate his mending, because besides looking a little disheveled and more than a little miffed, he looked pretty much like any other blade-thin, strung-out teenaged speed freak or runaway. He stood indolently, both arms loose and slightly spread. He was naked of weapons. Nothing threatening about the sight of him except his posture--shoulders slightly hunched, chin pointing at the ground, eyes up and showing all whites at the bottom. Typical vulture stance, just before the creature leaps from a tree limb and eats the eyes out of a dying desert animal. His little army surrounded him, providing the stage set for what Alek hoped would be some ill-conceived power play, a few obscenities thrown, maybe a boyish tantrum before departure back to the Covenhouse, the memories of Kansas and Takara's untimely demise still rolling around their fearful little brains. Then again, Kansas and Takara had taken their frustration out on the whole of the subway, so maybe there was going to be more. Maybe there was going to be fireworks. Or a nuclear bomb.
Alek felt snakes twist in his stomach the moment he spotted Aristotle reaching into his coat. "Down!" he almost barked, then felt a wash of relief that he had hesitated as Totty withdrew a box of Camels and pulled one out with his teeth. He waggled his eyebrows at Alek like Groucho Marx making a joke. Robey did not reach for the iron throwing knives that lined the insides of both sides of his coat. Sean did not move at all, as if waiting for some cue. Cold carrion comfort. So they were here to bring him back alive--or at least intact. That didn't mean they weren't going to have their fun first. Oh the joy of the hunt, Alek thought as he and Teresa began to casually shove through the crowd, working fast but not so fast they would attract a cop's attention. No one ran in New York unless they had a purse under their coat.
Walking medium-fast, breathing cold through his teeth, Alek's mind and inner sight jumped to a passing pedestrian heading in the opposite direction. Sure enough, he saw, Sean and his soldiers were on the move now.
"Don't look back," he whispered as they turned up Forty-second Street, past a city-subsidized apartment building and a corner store selling baseball caps and T-shirts. The hair on the back of Alek's neck tried to crawl down his back. They were walk-running now as fast as pedestrian traffic allowed, trying not to look like targets. Trying not to look suspicious.
Again his mind jumped, this time to a street musician in a doorway across the street.
Sean was not running. He and his soldiers were walking with predatory grace to the center of the street, en masse. He was laughing, a low rumble more felt than heard, like the prologue to an earthquake that could decimate an entire city block.
Limos and taxis shot past Alek in the slushy curb on their immediate left, their glass shivering. He saw his eyes in the trembling passing glass, his young, frightened eyes. Saw them squelch as something like a muffled explosion seemed to build in the canals of his ears. They were all too far past the musician for his piggybacking to be of any more service. Again the rumble like the street or something beneath it were awakening. He spun around.
A fire hydrant exploded as Sean crossed its path, spitting out a bloodlike gush of furious white water that soaked the street and the traffic and four dozen pedestrians before they managed to escape its wrath. Sean laughed. And still he walked, the acoustic rumble following him like a peculiar second retinue. Behind him, a sawhorse in the curb slanted sideways as the tarmac heaved and made a manhole cover quake and dance like a gigantic fallen quarter. More laughter, amped-up like an electric guitar ringing on a high, screechy A note; it made the street crack and smoke with his steps as if he were some hellspawn spat up upon the earth to set waste to it.
The ground buckled under Alek's feet, the walk sliding upward like a tombstone shoving itself upward through the earth. Alek grabbed a lamp post for security, slid around sideways off the rearing concrete and set himself down beside Teresa in the street. She worried her bottom lips, her eyes fixed behind them.
"What is it?"
"Psi..." He lost his train of thought at the sound of a rampaging car horn. A taxi headed for them, the cabby leaning on the horn. Alek grabbed Teresa by the arm and pulled them both out of its path. It roared by, all hot rolling exhaust and flying paper. Sean grinned as the cab headed dead-on for him and swept his arm outward as if to swat a fly. The airquake that followed immediately shimmered like deadpan heat. Brakes squealed and an apocalypse of white light flickered off the windshield of the cab, briefly illuminating the cabby's rictus of mortal, uncomprehending fear. Then the cab was off the road, was up on the walk, past it and through a stand of meters, the nose ramming like a bullet into the picture window of a lighted 24-hour Korean deli. The vehicle slammed to a crunching stop, half-in, half-out the face of the building, teetering, the horn blaring incessantly like a siren with no shut-off.
All bets were off this time. Pedestrians scattered like ants, which was the only advantage of an otherwise awful situation. Teresa hovered
in the street a moment, taking it all in, then chose the largest group of panicked escaping pedestrians to join. Alek followed wordlessly. They were thinking alike. The longer they kept to the tatters of the crowd, he thought, the harder they would be to follow. Unless, of course, Amadeus, that bastard, were tracking him by blood and feeding his slayers the information. If that were true, then they were truly doomed and there was nowhere they could hide for long.
He saw shadows flickering from the corners of his eyes and he decided he didn't want to contemplate that possibility. Maybe, he thought, by staying with a larger, more mobile crowd, there would be fewer casualties this time. Even the trinity of evil on their heels could not possibly kill every citizen they encountered without the police and maybe a full SWAT team first stopping them. Could they?
"Stay with me," Teresa said and took him by the hand.
They reached Port Authority and Alek felt his heart start to sink as the lights and the noise inside the station hit him like a fist to the midsection, staggering him back half a step. I don't want to go in there. I don't. Death there. He leaned against a wall to steady himself. Teresa pulled him by the arm. "They're coming, caro."
A security guard from across the concourse looked up from a newsstand and eyed the panicked crowd curiously.
Alek took a deep breath. There were crowds of people rushing back and forth, seeming to loom towards him and then just as quickly receding. Above echoed the huge vaulted ceiling and all around them came the relentless light reflecting off the white floors and walls like ice reflecting the heat of the sun; light poured from ticket counters and shop windows and fast-food restaurants and departure gates. Too much. He felt sick and dizzy. He glanced around for an escape route and saw they were directly across the street from the Church of the Holy Cross, its orange brickwork making it look more like a factory than a church. He grabbed Teresa by the sleeve and looked toward the church sitting there like something in disguise, something afraid to admit to what it was.
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