Her eyes darkened, reflected all the entwining lights of the rink. She watched a couple fumbling along, find their rhythm side by side on the ice. "The art is open. People learn so much faster. Evolution." She looked at him. "That's what Paris used to tell me."

"He died--was killed," Alek said. "I remember the name."

"He was murdered in 1962," she said, "by Aragon--Amadeus."

Alek digested that. "And you believe this?"

She narrowed her ancient, holy eyes. "Yes, caro."

He heard the lisp of her accent now, the pain in that other life. He stared into the ice like King Arthur awaiting an answer or a purpose. "Why me? Why choose me? Revenge?"

She turned him around so his back was to the crowd, so he saw only her, and slid her narrow hands up his lapels. Very strange that touch, part priestess, part lover. He leaned into her instinctively. "You want to corrupt me," he guessed, "to hurt Amadeus--"

"I want only the Chronicle. That is my revenge."

"I don't have it. I don't know who does."

"You know. You have only to remember."

"I don't understand--" His head swam. "You're using me, seducing me."

"Do you mind?"

He kissed her mouth in response, drawn to the shine of her skin, the darkness in her eyes. He touched her hair, worshipped the waterfall of it through his fingers. His heart pounding in his ears, he kissed the curve of her cheek, the perfect line of her throat, her delicate wreath of collarbones. No spell now; only her, only this.

He felt her swallow, gasp, heard her say: "I have watched you. I love you."

He sighed, let her go. "You don't know me. You don't know what I've done--"

But she was not listening now. Her gaze was turned away from him, out over the frozen water as if it were again the Pond where the Prince undoubtedly continued to turn his harrowing circles in a vain attempt to save his life. He heard it now too: Conflict. Human conflict from the street, the blare of a horn, several horns. A gunshot. Human voices. Human noises of pain and surprise and horror.

"Wait for me." Her hand covered his heart as if she meant to spell him. He watched her as she skated to the edge of the rink and unlaced her skates and climbed the stairs back up to street level. I love you. Wait. But she no longer touched him and that made her sorcery weak, too weak for the sudden panic that she would leave him to suffer alone with these unwashable memories.

He waited a moment, but just that, and then he went to the edge and tore away his skates and jogged up the stairs after her. A considerable crowd of tourists and locals had gathered at the corner of Forty-ninth Street, just outside an all-night deli, jabbering and mulling like a pen of confused wildebeests. He glanced in through the green-tinted window at the brightly-lit interior of the deli, at the refrigeration units and spilled bottles and boxes, but the cause of the commotion was obvious. And even had it not been, he would have known by the coppery stench of the interior and the bloodstain still wet and running on the wall behind the counter.

He closed his eyes. She wasn't far. Pulling his coat close, he muscled his way through the milling people and up the path towards Fifth Avenue. Halfway there he turned off onto an alley between a fenced apartment building and an industrial warehouse. He walked softly on the gla.s.s-littered fissures of broken asphalt, shaking his head as if that would clear away the memories of Eustace's death in an alley so like this one.

Alek breathed in deeply. She was near. Behind him, just beyond the elbow in the alley, came the resonant high-low of young voices at war. Alek edged around the first turn.

Two boys were standing over the body of another boy lying against the brick wall of the building, his head bracketed by graffiti. Spools of blood ran freely from the knife work on the boy's cheek and hands and ribs.

Alek eased himself back automatically into the shadows.

"I mean, no hard feelings now, Jimmy," one of the two other thugs said, a tall black boy with a s.h.i.tkicking expression on his stone-hard face that reminded Alek uncomfortably of the Stone Man. He flicked his steel stiletto closed like a circus trick. "You're just a living f.u.c.k-up, you know?" he said with a savage steel-toed kick to the downed boy's ribs.

Jimmy jerked, wanted to beg or curse, but his pain was too great and he could utter only a pale long moan through the clots of blood in his mouth. His eyes gleamed black in the semigloom; he wanted so much to escape the pain but the blood only ran more swiftly from his ruined body.

"Survival of the fittest--just ask Darwin," a second boy, his white T-shirt spattered with gore under his cowboy duster, added. He laughed at his own clever wit and pulled out a Cuban import, inserted it under Jimmy's ribs, and pulled the trigger twice--whomp, whomp--the sound m.u.f.fled and toylike against the jerking, suffering flesh of Jimmy's stomach.

Standing in the shadows some twelve or fifteen feet away, Teresa looked on with a shrewd, impatient understanding. Alek blinked and wondered if he was imagining all this, but there she was, motionless and unseen with only the glint of steel in her eyes to mark her position. The two punks turned toward him. Alek slid back a mere moment before they--or Teresa--would have seen him coming up on their blind side.

Like a couple of loosened spirits, the boys shot past him and down the mouth of the alley to where a battered lowrider was double-parked in the curb, hooting like a couple of athletes in the winner's circle. Teresa watched them go. Then she drifted forward like a beautiful plaything brought to horrifying life. She chose not to pursue the two of them; instead, she looked down on Jimmy. The boy was dying slow, his wet, shiny eyes turned up on her, on this lovely angel fallen to earth to frighten off his tormentors. He raised his hand to her face and she took it, fell effortlessly to one knee at his side. She cradled his head and drew his slashed palm to her lips and tongue. She whispered the sacred words of the rosary.

Jimmy closed his eyes. He said he loved her.

She leaned over Jimmy's face, held Jimmy's hand as she kissed the wounds on his face one at a time and took the last of his life through them. Jimmy's hand grew soft in her grip, fingers slackening, curling, lips parted in some final word or prayer. And when she was done, when she drew herself up, Alek saw what a fastidious creature she was with only her radiant flush of stolen life to paint her porcelain face with color.

She turned to look at him. She said, "I told you to wait."

The sound of her voice broke the spell that held him. He stumbled back against a wall of the warehouse. He saw the boy. Jimmy. Whose son? Who would know he was dead?

"Don't," Teresa said. "It makes for useless pain."

"You said pain makes you strong"--he slid down the wall into a crumpled, oily pile--"once."

Her eyes dropped away. She looked at Jimmy, touched his stony, lifeless cheek. "You want to hurt me. I understand."

"Those other boys..." He shook his head, was not surprised to notice he cast tears from his face with the gesture.

"I will have them in their time," she said. "'For everything there is a season--'" "He trusted you, G.o.d d.a.m.n you!" be sobbed.

"He stood with his friend when he pulled the trigger on the grocer," she said self-righteously.

Vampire, he thought at her with the weapon of his mind. Monster.

She looked up at him out of her dark and hallowed face. "My righteous child, life and death are not always as they should be. He was dying, the life running out of him. But now he will be a part of me forever."

"But he believed--"

"And it comforted him."

"You betrayed him!"

"Him?" She rose up and swayed toward him.

Alek shrank from her, turned his face away until the brickwork burned cold against his cheek. He sobbed loosely. No. It was over. He couldn't go on. He thought of the whelp he had just murdered. Eustace. And the dozens--hundreds--before him. Hundreds. He was a hypocrite and d.a.m.ned and he could not help himself. So be it.

He sensed her withdrawal and her sudden misery. So many years. So many faces. How did she live with them all? How the h.e.l.l was he supposed to? Her voice, bitter and ancient, was as reedy as the rain when it came: "At least I never denied what I was. At least I had that much pride left."

"f.u.c.k you," he said, screamed. He covered his face and wept until exhaustion and fear overtook him and he felt nothing at all.

Amadeus caught the rattler by the head, deflected its fanged attack with a deft underhanded strike. The snake recoiled, returned to the bottom of its tank in defeat. Sean saw the black mamba go for an opening. Sleek as an eel, man, yet the Father trapped its black, poisonous head inside the cup of his palm like a man stopping a fastball in mid-flight. The Father crushed its head, tossed the crumpled ribbon of its body aside.

b.i.t.c.hin' cool, man. Beautiful Saimin--f.u.c.king--jutsu!

The Father crossed his wrists and prepared himself for the next series of attacks. He was naked to the waist, his flesh oily white, flawless but for the colonies of bite marks striping the insides of his arms like the needletracks of the junkheads Sean had known in the system. "Again," said the Father.

Too cool for words. Sean grinned at the slayers watching from across the table, his tongue lolling. Takara looked interested in the exercise, but Booker onl y cup ped his chin and looked away. Spoilsport. Sean grabbed up the poker and crawled out across the table toward the big squirming tank. Fifteen in all. Fourteen now--mambas, black and green, slippery coral snakes, pygmy rattlers. He laughed and stirred the Medusan brew with the poker. The snakes knotted and writhed.

The rattlers gave a cold warning whicker of their tails.

He'd noticed these f.u.c.kers before, of course, sleeping under rocks in the big tank in a corner of the Father's cell. He'd even seen the Father handling them once, his thumb hooding their little angry heads, coiling them around his neck like the most experienced Kamir snakecharmer Sean had ever seen on TV. But they'd been pets, he thought, pretty f.u.c.kin' weird pets, but pets nonetheless. Or so Sean had thought.

A particularly energetic rattler jumped at him like a spring. No time, man! The motherf.u.c.ker was gonna-- Amadeus caught it by the throat. It coiled up around his wrist and attached itself to his forearm. Amadeus grunted and pulled it off, thrust it into the tank with its brethren. He spoke softly as he worked the tank, his voice tediously slow and his hands featureless blurs, and Sean listened intently to the words.

12.

"Christ, I can't carry on like this. I need a drink."

"You need salvation." "Shut the f.u.c.k up. You don't know what I need. I need to get the f.u.c.k away from you!" He stood up violently, only to weave against the wall with disorientation and the pain blooming behind his eyes like a migraine.

He steadied himself. Then he headed down the alley. Out there, on the avenue, came the rea.s.suring sounds of traffic and people and businesses open after hours, crime and pain and life and death, but at least they were human sounds, normal sounds, the sounds the real world made. He looked despondently around at this backalley s.p.a.ce he was trudging through like the drunken b.a.s.t.a.r.d he was, the garbage littered wide and the rusting Dumpsters and the subterranean skitter of rats fighting over a burger wrapper under a heat grate somewhere and wondered for the thousandth time how everything had gotten so hopelessly f.u.c.ked up in only a few short hours.

"And now?" Teresa said, d.o.g.g.i.ng him even now.

He shook his head. He wanted to rage at her, but he had no strength. None at all. "I don't know."

"You know."

"What do I know?" he said "That I'm a corpse waiting to die."

"You know that with the Chronicle you can stop them. It can be your security, your saving grace."

"I don't know s.h.i.t on a Tuesday," he said, leaning heavily against the corner of the building. Taxis and limousines coasted by, their windshield wipers screeking rubbery against the rain of diamond-hard droplets falling upon the city. Rain now. To freeze the snow into marble. He wondered when the winter would G.o.dd.a.m.n give it up already. "I don't know where the Chronicle is. I never did. Debra knew and Debra is dead."

"Paris knew," she said. "But Paris never told me."

He put his hot cheek to the soothing cold brick. "Which leaves us absolutely nowhere, Sister Teresa."

"But how did Debra know?" she asked. She took him by the arm, the desperation only barely contained in her voice, in her steel-gripped fingers and wide, light-refracting eyes. "Who told her? Who were her friends?

You must know something...anything..."

He closed his eyes and shrugged. And gi vi ng up, her prisoner completely now, he supposed, he told her what little he did know.

"There is a woman I once knew"--Amadeus deflected a coral snake, s.n.a.t.c.hed the head off a green mamba-- "a great keeper of books and strange lore. I think"--he caught the head of that problem rattler, crushed its skull in his palm--"if anyone knows the way, she"--another rattler, a third mamba-- "will."

Amadeus stopped. The remaining snakes had retreated to the bottom of the tank. The rattlers were silent.

They had given up at last.

"Again?" Sean asked expectantly.

"Enough."

"D'you know? Y'know, don'tcha? You know where he is?"

"Yes," said Amadeus, sliding into his robes. "I know."

"Righteous, man!" Sean gripped his master by the sleeve. "So we can, like, kick his a.s.s from here to--"

Amadeus dealt him a two-finger cobra strike to the throat.

Sean flew across the length of the table and crashed into his chair, overturning it again. Supine on the Abbey floor, he moaned dazedly, coughed, felt the two tiny puncture marks at the base of his throat. s.h.i.t, man, that was going to leave a h.e.l.l of a scar.

Yeah!

"Hodie mihi cras tibi," Amadeus hissed.

And though Sean did not understand the words, the sentiment was clear enough.

Mine.

Night.

Night in a club at 3:00 A.M., the time of the abyss, when the children of men slept and everything was neither here nor there. The club was in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a burned-out brownstone, so most of the light was lost in the greying wood and rusted steel that rose more than seven stories into the night.

Night in the Abyssus. The walls, painted black, crawled with arcane characters and g.a.n.g.b.a.n.ger badges in black spraypaint. On one wall was a religious mural of the Crucifixion done in rusty red and brown tones.

The club was located near the docks, so even here the cold fishy stench of the bay invaded, pervading the warmer scents of cheap perfume and melting hair mousse and clove smoke and fresh flesh and blood. The pit in the center of the club was filled with men and women entwined with their brethren, faces flushed with l.u.s.t and languor, heads thrown back in the grimace that was so like agony.

And on the tiny stage enmeshed in dogwire, presiding over it all like a high pagan priestess, she sang. She was like the victim of a vampire's obsession in silk gown and no shoes and naked arms ringed in delicate wreaths of barbed wire, and she sang much the same way, clinging to the microphone as if the weight of life and pa.s.sion around her would drown her damaged soul. She gave strange performances, alternately whispering her taboos and screeching them as if she would tear open the fragile fabric of the night around her and let in every wayward earthbound deity.

They said she was a fallen angel, the infamous Eleventh Scholar. They said she drank the blood of children and offered the kiss of purgatory to virgins.

They said a lot of things about Leigia, not all of which Salvatori believed. Though he did know for certain that the boss lady had a thing for Leigia and she was strictly no-go territory where he was concerned. He could respect that. He supposed he had to.

Leigia finished her last set to a sizzling roomwide silence and climbed down off the stage. Sal shot her down a whiskey sour full of cherries, her favorite.

Three o' clock and the Abyssus teemed, just like Sal liked it. Lots of heat and teenagers, more goth than anything else here. Black hair and albino skin, red mouths and smoky grey eyes. Black paten leather.

Painfreaks and vampire groupies and, sure, plenty of regular lowlifes too. A roomful of Cyndi Laupers and Boy Georges three days dead, a few geeks, the bearded poet type in worn army surplus jackets who quoted Nietzsche a lot, but he liked it; it was home.

Sal drew down a quartet of beers with enthusiasm. He'd be working at The Hole (as the patrons obstinately called it) for twenty-eight years now and it was a big deal. Talent night Tuesdays and Fridays, industrial metal band on Sat.u.r.days, blood orgy almost every night. Boss lady ran a tight ship but gave good benefits, decent pay. She and Empirius had made a good man of Sal, who'd seen nothing but tommy guns and bloodshed and human ghouls high on visceral violence most of his life.

Yeah, Akisha was okay, took none of the schtick the patrons who sometimes got high and rowdy after a band cooled down were apt to hand the barkeep. Even going so far as to install a couple of human familiar- heavies at the back door. Pip and Kyle. Wussy names, but Sal wasn't fooled none. Pip was an Outback brawler with Lou Ferrigno's face and Mike Tyson's left hook; Kyle was no better--an ex-Navy Seal, he'd eaten army privates for lunch during Desert Storm, or so the stories went. Some fancy work back there.

Yeah, Akisha was a fine woman indeed. And Empirius--well, s.h.i.t. Sal spat on the floor and crossed himself, first upright and then upside-down. It was just too d.a.m.n bad about the boss man.

But Sal also knew that when you were living life on the edge the way his breed were apt to do, you couldn't go around hanging your head all day and mourning the pa.s.sing of every vamp you knew. They died too fast.

s.h.i.t, faster than some humans, the way the slayers culled the herd And anyway, it was Sat.u.r.day and Sat.u.r.days were a fine night. Plenty of controlled chaos, lots of overheated bodies and quick smiles. Everyone getting down and ready for Shrapnel's first set, Leigia warming them up, getting them heated and wanting more. Nights like these were G.o.dd.a.m.n magic. Blacklights poured down through a crowd of chainsmoking teenagers and cleaved like purple cream to the base of the raised altarlike stage in the middle of the Pit.