But he didn't want to be a hero and he didn't want to be a sacrifice. And it wasn't fair, G.o.dd.a.m.nit. 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 gla.s.s 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 G.o.ds 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 n.o.blemen. 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 their history into Italian, seeking rare texts, stealing doc.u.ments 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 a.s.sa.s.sin. 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 C ovenant . 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."

"He stole the Chronicle back."

"You know the rest then," she said.

He shook his head. "I know only--" He stopped, the words dying on his tongue, the terror so great a pressure it stopped his breathing, maybe his heart.

"What Debra said?" she asked d.a.m.ningly.

11.

In the dream he walked down a hallway constructed entirely of human skulls like the tunnels leading down and away into the arcane catacombs under some of the greater older cities of the world. Rome--maybe Paris. Something slithered over his feet and he looked down and recognized it as an adder. He kicked it away and walked on. And near the end, silhouetted by a sunburst of careening light so great he was forced to squint, he saw a tall, gaunt figure all in black, with reams of glistening silken hair and eyes like white pearls and a smile like a blade. In its right hand he gripped the hilt of a sword, long and terrible, and that sword dripped blood like rain upon the stones of the corridor.

In its other, left hand, it held a trophy by the hank of its long, blood-encrusted hair, the unfortunate's face lost in deepest shadow.

And it was then and only then that Amadeus realized he was having The Dream again, the visual dream. A dream of sights, of light and shadow and the bruised places in between.

The figure shifted and the chaotic lights he had been half-blocking only a moment ago intensified, set Amadeus's tender eyes to bleeding with the sight of all that light in his life all at once. The deadly black figure laughed and held aloft his prize, letting that light reflect off the disembodied head's marble-white flesh and shimmering white hair and redness of death.

Death.

His death.

His death unrepentant, unabsolved.

d.a.m.ned.

Amadeus opened his mouth as he had each time upon witnessing the sight of his own destruction and cried out with the horror and the unfairness of it all. The years--centuries--he'd spent, saving his own soul, saving his most beloved's. And now this...

But there the dream ended and he awakened trembling and sweating, his sword pointing up at the blinding shimmer of light baking his tender sun-shunned skin, pointing it at the breathy tall figure standing over his bed. And for a moment he almost thought it was Alek and Alek's vengeance and he had a terrible desire to lower his sword. But then, once more, he remembered the great betrayer's work to undo him, to undo all of the Coven, all his great work, and he realized Alek was not here, was too great a coward to face him yet, and he held the sword unflinchingly on his target.

The figure's hands swept up in a defensive gesture as if to fend off an a.s.sault. The light grazed him and was gone. "s.h.i.t. Sorry, Father," the master slayer Booker whispered in his booming baritone voice, "I thought you were awake, is all. I didn't know..."

His watch--it was only his d.a.m.nable watch! It was only d.a.m.nable Booker! Amadeus lowered his sword and sat up in bed. "What do you want?"

"I...there's someone to see you. In the parlor."

"Who? Alek?"

"No." Booker hesitated. "A man, just a man. About sixty-five, seventy. Dressed like a whitebread banker.

Rich b.a.s.t.a.r.d. He didn't say his name. But he knew you, he said."

Amadeus ran the sweating palm of his hand over his face. A man. Only a man. But he knew who it was immediately--it could be Benedictine and none other at this junction--and the Cardinal was far more than a mere man. And far less. Rising naked from the bed, having slept that way, if sleep was indeed what one would call that upsetting interlude, Amadeus began to dress for the audience. Black slacks and black habit, the frogs on the habit b.u.t.toned so tight he felt like a soldier getting ready to go off to war. Black boots and the iron bootknife. Lastly, he slid the black cossacklike mantel onto his shoulders and clipped it closed with a chain. Regal, and larger for the cloak, able to match Benedictine's personal extravagance, he hoped, he made for the door of his cell.

At the end of the brick hallway, at the bottom of the cellar steps leading up to the ground floor, lurked Alek's brother, indecisive, yes, trying to understand his master's unease. Trying to understand any of this madness, of course. Maybe even trying to protect his master.

Then his pocket pager went off and Booker seemed immensely pleased for the interruption. "Oh Jesus, that's probably Dr. Sacco. d.a.m.n man never leaves me have any peace, even on my days off. I swear to G.o.d, if I-- ".

"Go to your hospital," Amadeus commanded him, tying up his long hair with a hank of silk ribbon. "Care for your sick. I will need no retinue."

Booker hovered a moment more. Wanting to help, wanting more to go, to sink beneath the surface of his human life and be just a doctor now, a man. At least for a while. Maybe until all of this was over. "Go," Amadeus whispered harshly. And so Booker did.

"We must a.s.sume Knight is aware of our plans." Cardinal Benedictine said some five minutes later, after Amadeus had seen the man in the parlor to one of the wing chairs near the fireplace. The fury seethed like a nest of snakes in his whiskey-scoured voice and made him drum his fingers irritably against the wooden armrest of the chair.

The two men had not seen each other for years, and yet the old man, once a priest out of St. Patrick's diocese not more than a stone's throw from the Covenhouse, had made no formal or informal greetings, had not even waited until his host's arrival before breaking open a bottle of Scotch and fetching a gla.s.s and starting up the fireplace. And for the last five minutes, as the room warmed around them, their words had been naught but filled with bitter explanation and the stern short syllabus of total debriefing. Of course they despised each other as two creatures must whom nature had put natural enmity between but whose ambitions and aims had wracked that relationship into something unnatural, but at least--for the moment--they bit back their true thoughts with steel-trap grimaces.

The debriefing was finished. Now came the subjective part of their talk which Amadeus had always despised.

He shifted in his seat, the fireplace sweating his flesh under the layers of clothing. He spoke softly, with no attempt to use his voice or mind to influence or otherwise sway Benedictine's mood. The man, in his present state of almost perfect sobriety, would have required too much work. And anyway, Benedictine knew him too well and understood Amadeus's race perhaps better than any other human being in the church--or indeed the world; he would sense the penetration, deduct it rightly as desperation on Amadeus's part, and then there would only be more questions, more trouble. "I still do not see how this little error could have happened, Cardinal," he said, shaking his head as if to throw off the remainder of the shock. "I made him my personal student. He knows nothing that I have not told him--"

"Then someone--presumably Paris's wh.o.r.e--is giving him cla.s.sified information. G.o.d help us all if he puts it all together. There will be a period of darkness the church has never known before, not even during the Crusades." Benedictine coughed harshly, seemed surprised by the rebellion of his aged body, as if he had forgotten how mortal and fragile it was growing all around him. He cleared his throat angrily.

"I am truly sorry," Amadeus said without emotion.

"I flew in from half a world away because of this 'little error', as you call it. I had to leave important Council matters and lie to His Eminence himself just to be here, d.a.m.nit it all to h.e.l.l, and I won't have you treating this thing like some hangnail...!" Again the coughing fit seized him.

Amadeus smiled. He knew the man well enough to know he was lying now. Benedictine had spoken to no one before coming here. No one ever questioned Benedictine's work or intentions. The man was powerful.

In the last twenty years he had acquired his own private jet and his own retinue of bodyguards. The Papal Council already considered him heir to Peter's seat in Rome--a position that would have undoubtedly fallen to Benedictine's superior Cardinal Guiseppe had the man not died some five years earlier of snakebite. The circ.u.mstances were a little unusual, but Amadeus had enough knowledge of the Roman Catholic Church to know that certain men were possessed of almost preternatural luck and even greater influence. So he took Benedictine's angry ravings on the chin, as always. As always, he played his loyal dog part, knowing that one day this man would be all that stood between his race and total annihilation.

Benedictine tipped his gla.s.s back, the ice c.h.i.n.king against his false teeth. The liquor seemed to stop his cough, surprisingly. And curb his roiling anger. "But we've got to forget about the hows and whys for the moment and do something about the situation," he said, his voice falling soft against the walls of the Covenhouse as his sobriety began to slip. He closed his eyes, savoring the whiskey. "If you cannot contain it, Covenmaster, we in Rome shall."

"I am doing my best, Cardinal."

"Well, your best is not good enough, is it? Where is he? Why haven't you found him yet?" The bottom of his gla.s.s banged against the armrest like a judge's gavel. "I thought you were some great all-seeing oracle, some h.e.l.lishly talented sibyl that saw to the ends of the earth, I thought--"

"The city is large," Amadeus calmly explained, lied, "and even my power is limited. I see the future, Cardinal, not the present."

"I thought he was bound to you, you f.u.c.king demon! What have you been doing with him all these years?"

Amadeus closed his eyes. The darkness was the same either way, but sometimes, in times of great angst, like now, he almost felt he could control it, the dark. Draw it close like a cloak to hide a shame. The dark, after all, was where his breed originated. And where it would eventually return to, in time. Yes, it would be so easy to find and destroy the whelp. He need only confront Alek, draw his sword, and come home with the whelp's head at the end of it. So easy. And it would save his place in the Covenant, would probably save his own d.a.m.nable life. But Benedictine couldn't understand the price. He couldn't understand the pain of watching your most beautiful and singular piece of art die at your own hands, your magnum opus, the one thing all your life led up to, simply crumble away like that. For Alek to die, all that power wasted, all that training vanished with one fell swoop. It was like Donatello taking a balsa hammer to his beloved David statue. It scarcely deserved imagining.

He said, "I must have time. A week at least--"

"There is no time! I told you, we must a.s.sume Knight knows about our plans, and that would mean he is trying to find the Chronicle even as we speak. d.a.m.n you, we can't wait even another day!"

"I want to let him run."

"What?"

"I want him to run. To find the Chronicle. If he can."

For a moment Benedictine was silent. For a moment he almost seemed prepared for another bitter outburst.

And then reason and understanding set in, warming his ambition like the whiskey warming his belly. The ice cubes swirled around his gla.s.s as the man considered the implications of what Amadeus had just said.

Amadeus smiled and halved his eyes. "Yes, Paris's wh.o.r.e knows things. And so does Debra's wh.o.r.e. Who knows where such things may take them together?" Amadeus paused to let all this thinking sink through the mortal's thick skull. And I am quite certain that Rome will greet you well as you return triumphant from your pilgrimage with their Chronicle under your arm. What do you think, Cardinal?

Benedictine let out his breath. The man practically reeked of joy, suddenly. "A week, you say?"

"I trained him to be my double, Cardinal. Please understand--I must have at least that." Amadeus stood up to indicate the audience was, at least to his thinking, over. Benedictine stood as well. Like most humans, the man, even with all his human power and influence, was still a man standing in the presence of that rarest of creatures--one of his few natural predators. He was trapped under the sway of a cobra that he perceived as a pet. "One week. And I will have your Chronicle in one hand and my wayward acolyte's head in the other. I swear it."

A pause. And then Benedictine climbed to his feet. "Do what is necessary. I will do what I can here to keep the church from getting underfoot, getting in our way. I'll give you your week. But hear well, you nightcrawler, you make sure that when you have Knight, that you have him dead. Is that understood?"

"Of course, Cardinal."

"You sound unsure, Covenmaster."

Amadeus shrugged. "He is my double, Cardinal."

"He's not that good," Benedictine said, more a question than anything else.

"Like me," Amadeus said, "he is a king among his kind."

Benedictine considered this. Then the man let out his breath, coughed again, hissingly, the phlegmatic cough of the perpetually ill. Amadeus thought of serpents shimmering across the hardwood floor of the parlor. From him to the Cardinal's feet. Biting with raspy mouths full of ragged fangs. The Cardinal took a hesitant step back as if sensing this threat on some subconscious level. Yet the poison was already there, the reasoning planted like a fertile seed in the mortal's tender mind. Benedictine simply would not know it until much later, when everything came to pa.s.s. He said, low and intimate, "Do not f.u.c.k this up. The Purge is only a few years off, and none of us need a reprisal of 1962. That or...things may have to be done."

"Of course, Your Eminence." And Amadeus tipped his head and clicked his heels in the manner of the Old World Style.

Benedictine looked him up and down. Amadeus felt the man's eyes on him like chips of fire. "I want that Chronicle," Benedictine whispered. "And believe me, Father, you do not want to see me disappointed. I am not as forgiving as my predecessor."

Amadeus smiled evenly and sent him an army of serpents to track his dreams for the next seven days. "I a.s.sure you, Your Eminence, failure is the farthest thing from my mind."

He scarcely remembered getting up and rushing from the restaurant, his mind and body were in such a state of turmoil. He glanced around and suddenly found himself in Rockefeller Center, walking at a purposeless speed along the path lined with evergreens leading toward the ice skating rink from which he could already hear the needling strains of music. Above the rink stood the golden statue of Mercury in mid-flight. Behind him the giant Vermont fir was naked of lights and had been for over a month. February. No Christmas, no spring. Only cold white and an endless sea of time. Only that. Away from the restaurant, among familiar surroundings, their conversation of moment's before seemed less real, a thing of dreams, bad dreams, lies.

He quickly regained his wits and watched the night skaters sweeping across the mirrored ice and felt his own self again.

For the moment.

"Do you want to skate?" Teresa asked from behind him.

He didn't quite start. "They want me--he wants me--"

"I'll bet you're an excellent skater," she said, coaxing him toward the kiosk. He let her kidnap him a second time. Apparently their date wasn't over. It seemed useless to resist. They rented skates from the vendor, tied them on, and set out on the ice. There were quite a few people in the rink and they waited their turn for a break in the pattern of traffic before coasting in and slowly building up their speed. Alek turned, half- expecting to find the little Italian nun lagging far behind, but instead she cut the turns even sharper than he did and moved up effortlessly beside him. Then she took him from the elbow and broke him free from the herd.

And then it was as if they were flying, soaring side by side through the cold wintry air, a pair of identical spirits leaving the earth and all its petty problems far behind in favor of another place, a different world. It was a feeling that lasted only a few minutes, but when it was over and Teresa led him to the side of the rink, Alek was breathless with exhilaration. He could feel the summoned blood in his cheeks like roses, hot and blooming, and his pulse ran like a clock in his throat and wrists. So long, he thought, it's been so long since I felt this...

"Where did you learn to skate like that?" he gasped.