This--it's all about the f.u.c.king church!"

Amadeus shook his head.

"It's about the plan. The Purge."

Amadeus's eyes snapped to attention and Alek knew then, knew for sure, that he was right. Teresa was right.

Alek spoke the words he thought. "You--Aragon--you betrayed Paris--all the other vampires--for the church.

You made a deal with them, didn't you? Didn't you?"

The Covenmaster's silence and indecision was acquiescence enough. Amadeus lowered the sword to his side.

He seemed to know the charade was over, all the masks gone. He closed his eyes and said, "Alek, beloved, know that--that everything I did, I did for love."

"Love? The word rots on your tongue!"

Amadeus ignored the outburst. "Where is the Chronicle?"

"I don't know."

"You know."

"I don't know! No one does! Byron did, but you killed him." He swallowed down a sob as the claustrophobic walls of too many memories pressed into him like a collapsing tomb. "You killed him," he said again. "And Debra. Only they knew..."

The Father's simmering white eyes opened. "Do not pursue this, my whelp. Please..."

"I have to!" Alek shouted, shuddered, caught a glance of the shir out of the corner of his eye. Maybe if he could just get ahold of it, maybe in the Father's present state of angst, maybe...maybe he would have half a chance in h.e.l.l at life. If he could get there, if he could keep the Father off-balance long enough. He said, "Teresa, Paris--they believed the church was going to destroy us, all of us. Like in the Inquisitions. Like that.

And any deal you cut isn't going to be worth s.h.i.t when they get what they want."

"Teresa lies. And you don't know the church--"

"The Chronicle is proof! Or why would you be here now? Who sent you? Your masters from the church?"

He put his hand upon the desk. He shook his head. "It doesn't matter. Maybe the Chronicle can protect us-- maybe it'll change everyone's idea of what's going on. But when the church gets it again it's over for all of us, you blind b.a.s.t.a.r.d. You, me, anyone you're protecting." Alek let out his breath, almost a sob. He was so close, close enough to smell the steel of the blade. "We're all marked, all our race. And the humans will be the slayers then, they'll--"

Amadeus rushed forward, his eyes frenzied. He slapped Alek across the face, gripped him by the shoulders and pulled him forward. "The church protects me and I protect you. I always have!"

Alek spat in his master's face. "I don't want your protection!"

The mad, holy expression on the Covenmaster's face shattered like panes of gla.s.s. He slapped his disciple again and this time the momentum of the blow cast Alek against Akisha's desk with all the terrible force of a bird struck down from its perch by a cat's paw.

Alek shuddered from the blow, caught himself, steadied himself, gripped the edge of the desk for purchase. He shook himself. His face stung as if the flesh had been peeled from the bone. He tried to tell himself that the Father was misguided, a thrall of the church, a victim like them all, but he knew that wasn't true.

Amadeus was just lost. And this would not be the last time. Amadeus would hit him again and again.

Amadeus would hit him until his will was as broken as his body and he would do anything, say anything, the Father wanted. Anything the church wanted. Because a ward of Amadeus was forever...

Through a veil of tears, Alek saw the shirasaya lying on the ink blotter of Akisha's desk. He reached for it-- then yanked his hand back compulsively as Amadeus's blade hissed by a mere inch from Alek's hand, leaving a long gash in the blotter and an even deeper groove in the wood of the desk. Alek stood back, the desk between them, and tried to decide what to do before Amadeus-- "Akisha?"

Both slayers turned toward the third voice at once. Akisha's girl was on her hands and knees on the floor beside her lover's body. She must have emerged from her dreamplace on Akisha's death and was staring down at the b.l.o.o.d.y remains of the mistress in wide-eyed, childish confusion. As if she could not understand how something so immortal could now be so dead. "Akisha?" came the girl's tiny, plaintive voice again. And then her expression broke. "Akeeeeshaaaa..."

It was all the distraction Alek needed. He grabbed up the shirasaya, liberating it from the scabbard and pointing the savage weapon at Amadeus like a quivering finger. "I'm not going back. I won't go back with you!"

Amadeus stood a moment indecisively. And then he laughed. He spread his arms, and in his coat and suit of rude wool clothes he looked absurdly like Jonathan Edwards about to sermonize the American Separatists into h.e.l.l. "Futile, this. How can you win against the enemy who lives inside your head, who knows your devices even as you do. Remember, beloved, it is my blood you have in your veins. That shall never go away. I will be a part of you forever."

He drifted around the desk and toward his wayward acolyte like some horrible, earthbound spirit.

Alek made a sickened, strangling noise. "Don't..."

Amadeus stopped and narrowed his eyes. "You belong to me."

"I don't. I belong to Debra."

"Debra is dead."

"Sometimes the dead come back."

Amadeus swayed closer, put out a long white hand to caress his hair as though to challenge him to do this--to strike his master and teacher. Alek blinked, and for just a moment Amadeus's figure transfigured into something looming and monstrous and shadowy and disfigured, something not of this world, something that had never belonged to it, something unnatural and hideous to behold-- Alek shuddered, groaned at the contact, and thrust the shirasaya forward through the cage of his master's ribs and up into Amadeus gut with all his sudden strength of panic, up, up further, all the way in, burying the longsword in his master all the way up to the simple rosewood hilt-- And halted.

Amadeus's expression remained unblemished by either surpris e or ag ony. Alek saw no defeat there, nothing that could be hurt, could die. Only the prowling rage of something inhuman and unstoppable, petty and rejected. And in that single, still moment of absolute crux, Alek found himself thinking of, not Teresa nor even Debra or Akisha cooling on the floor not a dozen steps away, but of the Prince of swans falling on his ice and dying.

Why must the heroes always die?

"d.a.m.nable," Amadeus said. "d.a.m.nable whelp. I am finished with you. Go to your sister, Alek. Now."

Amadeus grabbed the sword just behind the pommel and jerked it unhesitantly out of the gaping hole in his gut and drove the hilt into Alek's stomach. Alek barely felt it as he careened over Akisha's desk and hit the Plexiglas pane of the office window behind it. The gla.s.s shuddered, shrieked, struggled to maintain its reputation--only a second--then gave it up.

After that there was only the hands of the wind and the sickening vertigo of a four-hundred foot plunge to the city floor below. He felt the wind animate his coat like the tattered wings of a great bat, and that made him wish in some final moment of utter desperation that he really could change as the stories and movies professed, shrink into a different creature with membranous wings that could cup and hold the wind and make him fly. Really, truly fly. At last, at long last-- But then he gave up the fantasy and let the darkness have him and hide him and take him down into a place after which no one could follow him.

15.

The holiday season was always marvelous at McEnroy Home, with baskets of donated goodies, and shopping sprees and outings arranged by the affluent. At eight years of age, Alek enjoyed the time of the year immensely, the theatre and carnival, the colored lights and the tinkling laughter and the warmth the city briefly embraced.

Especially wonderful were the outings when they toured someplace magic and perfect; it was a chance to feel clever and take Debra by the hand and lead her down through the sacred halls of the museums he read so much about and see the Masters of Old Europe and the timeless G.o.ds with beast's heads in their upright, airtight gla.s.s coffins. A chance to hunt down and study marvelous quarry constructed of oils and bronze and marble and light.

"Sekhmet," Debra said once in The Hall of G.o.ds and pointed up at the lion-headed G.o.ddess. "Battlequeen.

She killed her enemies without mercy and drank their blood." Debra lingered over the statue, but Alek moved on quickly, eyes averted, because the clever feline grin on Sekhmet's whiskered face was so like Debra's own.

They saw Daumier and Delacroix and Matisse's white-plumed ladies. And Alek stood spellbound before the splattering bloodlike oils of Jerome Bosch, fearing and admiring the images that spoke without moving, those secrets whispered without words.

Afterward, the cla.s.s was ushered to Rockefeller Center as if they were expected to mingle with the children who came with parents and would leave with them. The McEnroy children, uniform in their grey, state- issued greatcoats, skated between boys in letter jackets and girls in flared, candy-pinked tulle skirts, all of it mother-chosen affectations to carefully define character in their children. And the Home children all grey- coated and incongruous, Alek thought, all but Debra. Of course.

As Alek watched, his sister crept up to the benches where the doting parents sat watching the expensive clothing their children had discarded in the warm rush of their expended energy and stole a young teenaged boy's black leather jacket almost right out from under the nose of his father. She smiled and swirled across the ice toward him in her red holiday dress and black jacket as the other Home children looked on with horror and pointed at her. "You can't do that," Alek chided her as she linked her hand through his.

She laughed. Her lips looked moist. "Why?"

"Because."

"d.a.m.n because! Don't be such a Puritan, Alek!" She broke away and ran for the center of the pond where she executed a series of death-defying off-the-ice flips and landed on her feet like a cat with a cat's same wicked pride.

Alek watched her antics from a bench, enjoying them and her. He did not understand her thoughts many times, and sometimes could not guess at her intentions, but she was beautiful and clever and he would love her forever, so what did anything else matter?

He smiled and settled back on the bench to watch her creep up like a ghost and steal a link of candy from the pocket of another of the Home children. And it was then, when he was most preoccupied and off-guard, that he felt his hackles stiffen as a melodious whistling drifted to him from behind. A flock of pigeons scattered as the b.i.t.c.h appeared on the gravel walk in front of Alek's bench. She was bundled stupidly, like some German female spy in a war movie, with m.u.f.fs on her scrawny hands and little black Gestapo gla.s.ses on her pasty face. Smiling, she ambled by in her dark coat as if expecting some secret rendezvous. Alek held his breath and waited. Maybe the b.i.t.c.h hadn't noticed his presence amidst all the other children, or no longer cared.

Maybe she had a new victim.

But after a long, silent, unbreathing moment Alek felt the hiss of a released breath in his hair, felt a raw, knuckled hand brush his cheek briefly then settle itself like a spider on his shoulder. Alek heard a helpless whimper gather in his throat. Was there anywhere safe? Anywhere at all? He closed his eyes tight; he wanted to go away, run away with Debra right this minute...

And then, as if summoned, he opened his eyes and spotted his sister skating toward him, hands in her pockets, eyes narrow slits, her posture casual and yet like that of a stalking beast, and the hand quickly disappeared. He sobbed as she settled on the bench beside him, sobbed into her hair, quite surprised with himself, and she held him and allowed for it. And Debra kissed the tears from his face and spoke her savage words of love into his mind, and she seemed so beautiful and angelic to him that he feared what she would become.

Somewhere far off at the other end of the pond a group of Home children had joined a group of wa.s.slers in their songs, and it was then that he remembered how Debra was to be fostered out to the Forsythes for Christmas this year and how they must be apart, and the fear was hard, red as life itself inside him, and he wondered if it would crack his very soul open...

"My beloved," she whispered, her voice soft and strong like the sultry voices of the movie actresses she so wanted to be like, but with more truth than any actress, more feeling. "We will always be together. Don't you know? Wherever you are I can see and protect you. I adore you and will love you forever." She kissed him and held him close, and between them, on the chain around her neck where she had hung it, he could almost feel the warm gold magic of the ring.

Alek woke sharply to the shadow-deep night of the Home at midnight. Through the window he could see a moon the color of steel hanging like a weapon in the heavens and casting light in a runner to the foot of his bed. He looked at the moonlight, the warm glow of it, and thought of Debra, Debra in her black coat and blacker hair, how the moon always caught red in the pits of her eyes. It was Christmas Eve, and Debra was gone now to Ithaca with the Forsythes so they could play house and feel pious for the season, d.a.m.n them.

He hoped she ate their dog.

He turned over in bed and pillowed his head on his folded arms. He studied the waterstain on the ceiling above his bed, imagining ghoulish faces that could frighten the Forsythes and the social workers and all the other people in the Home who conspired to separate them. He hated them all with the deepest part of his heart and soul and more.

And he had just started wondering if that was all right, to hate everyone so completely, when he thought he heard a whippoorwill shrill somewhere in the city that cowered in the night. Whippoorwill. Someone's dying, Debra would say.

Except it wasn't.

It was...whistling He sat bolt upright. And all at once he felt the quiet of the Home smother him like a great faulty web falling in, like a dirty blanket, like that, or something worse. He should get out of here, he knew, get help, except there were no hall monitors at this time of the night and most of the staff were gone for Christmas. A handful of kids without foster homes like himself slept safe in their beds in other rooms, but that was so far away.

Far away. Like Debra was far away. He was alone, he realized. Completely alone.

The whistling deepened, drew nearer.

His heart throbbed painfully in his chest. It was difficult to think, to even feel. He shivered violently all over and found moist diamonds of sweat sparkling on the backs of his hands. He should rise and go to the window, escape into the night the way he and Debra did on countless other nights. Except his body felt paralyzed and alien to him and all he could do was shudder and sweat and chant Debra's name over and over again like a mantra or a prayer for deliverance.

He felt his heart die and his body seize up when the door of his room clicked open. He wasn't moving, only fearing, fearing something new and horrible and somehow inevitable. Maybe it was only a late-night bed check by the director of the Home, he thought, staring with wide, horrified eyes at the monstrous and alien shadow eating up the wall, something hideous and unnatural to behold. Maybe if he held perfectly still and didn't say a thing, maybe then he wouldn't be noticed, maybe-- The door closed silently but with great force, like a seal, locking him in with this thing now.

And Alek stopped shuddering completely like someone had turned a switch off inside of him. Instead he found himself reaching beside his bed for one of the sketch pencils in the tin cup on the nightstand. He drew it close to him and buried it under his bedclothes.

The presence glided toward him and settled in the dark at his bedside. Alek did not look, did not flinch even when the dry, ugly hand touched his hair. Don't panic, he told himself--Debra's earliest lesson when they first began to hunt at night and he was so afraid of being caught. Never panic. Panic gets you caught.

"Pretty little blackbird."

"I'll tell." He felt surprised that he could still speak. "I'll scream until they come. I swear it."

The hand on his face, as dead and rotten as the hand of a movie mummy's, dropped to his collar, then ripped the b.u.t.tons violently from the front of his nightshirt. "And if you make them come, I'll tell them about all the nights I saw Alek and Debra Knight run away and kill animals and drink their blood. I'll tell them all about the bloodstained and torn clothing that disappears and the dirt and blood under your fingernails, and if they don't believe me, I'll show them the evidence. And do you know what they will do to you, Alek?

They'll take you both and put you in a place for mad kids because they don't understand, and then they'll split you up and you will never see your sister again."

"Liar! I don't believe you!" he heard himself whisper vehemently.

"I don't care if you do." The hand, the terrifying hand, slid caressingly down Alek's body beneath the open shirt, and he shivered. "How cold you are," the b.i.t.c.h complained. "As cold as the dead."

Alek shuddered inside and out. It was all he could do to keep from thinking about her words. "What...what do you want?"

The bed groaned as it took on weight. The hand played over his face, yet he felt no instinct to flee just yet, no need to panic. He only tightened his hold on the pencil under his covers.

"You're a vampire," said the b.i.t.c.h, as simple as a fact. Her mouth gleamed as she spoke. "Did you know you'll be beautiful and young and powerful forever, Alek? Do you know how wonderful it will be for you?

Do you have any idea of what promise the world holds for you?"

No, Alek wanted to tell her, to scream, no it's not wonderful or promising. It's horrible. It's confusing. What they were, whatever it was, was like being locked inside a black box with no light and no air, and they had to keep going, keep living, even though they knew it would probably never end. And the most horrible part of it was that there was a part of them that was real and human, but they'd abandoned it once too often and now they couldn't seem to reach it anymore. They lived inside a black canvas like a Bosch they couldn't take themselves out of and they looked out on a bright, beautiful world that wasn't really theirs anymore, and sometimes that made him want to weep until he was carried away on a river of his sorrow...

He wanted to say these things, because they were true and because they hurt and they might wound Bessell, but his voice was constricted now with his suddenly rediscovered panic.

"I want to be like you," the b.i.t.c.h whispered. She leaned close, close, breath cloying. "I want to be a vampire. Make me into one. I want to hunt at night with you and be a part of your world. Take me, Alek.

Bite me and take me with you and I promise to serve you forever. I swear it."

But...but he couldn't! He didn't know why this had happened to them--or how--but it had, and they hadn't been made by anyone, and the animals they killed only died and stayed that way, just like the b.i.t.c.h would...

"Please, Alek. I don't want the life that's chosen for me. I want to make my own choices, I want to live my own life. I want--so many things. Strength. Power. Immortality. Make me a vampire and I'll be your disciple," the b.i.t.c.h whispered. "I will join you, learn from you, help you--"

The b.i.t.c.h's weight was heavy on him then, crushing his ribs, the hands hot and filthy on his skin, and the panic was there again--wild and instinctual--and Alek turned away his face, half to gag and half to sob, but with his head turned he felt the slimy, yellowed teeth at his throat and something broke inside him, something ma.s.sive and snarling, and in one movement his hand came up under the sheet and he felt the pencil sink into soft, warm, ponderous flesh and splinter off, and after that there was only dead weight and the b.i.t.c.h's wet scream m.u.f.fled against Alek's throat, and suddenly the weight upon him was not so terrible, and Alek gathered himself and pushed out with every ounce of strength he had and watched, satisfied, as Bessell grunted and the force of it actually cast her over the foot of the bed to crash against the highboy beside the window, the side of the b.i.t.c.h's head connecting with it with a hearty thump and the woman slamming to the floor just below the window and the bladelike quarter moon.

Alek shook himself to rid himself of the b.i.t.c.h's touch and crawled to the foot of the bed and looked down.

Wilma Bessell lay in a ma.s.sive lump on the floor. A little blood trickled from just below her ribs where the pencil had gashed her, and there was an angry red area over one temple, but her breathing was deep and normal. He hadn't killed the woman, thank G.o.d.

G.o.d had nothing to do with it.

Alek looked up at the window.

Debra teetered on the outer sill, smiling in at him. The snow was a rain of knives out there, and yet she crouched in only her thin red camisole and black leather jacket, her feet bare, la.s.sos of her wet black hair lashed across her face and neck like the long arms of spiders. She tapped at the gla.s.s expectantly and Alek wasted no time and went to her immediately and swung open the pane for her lithe entry. "Debra," he said, but she corrected him, saying, "Sekhmet, beloved," and danced out of his hold to study the brained b.i.t.c.h at her feet.

"She wants to be a vampire," Alek explained, feeling sad and sick and a little afraid.

"The stupid cow, does she now?" Debra smiled strangely at him, her eyes black and shiny as wet leather.

She clucked her tongue over the b.i.t.c.h's body. "Only two to an establishment, I'm afraid," she said very tragically and knelt down beside the woman, indicating that Alek should join her. And as Alek watched, paralyzed with horror, his twin kissed the b.i.t.c.h's forehead, then withdrew a delicate little straight razor from the pocket of her coat and slit the soft pouch of flesh under the b.i.t.c.h's chin from one ear to the other. The flesh split away from the great vein like a pair of open gaping lips.

The b.i.t.c.h moaned, shuddered once, and was silent forever.