16.

"Alek Knight."

He opened his eyes almost immediately; almost immediately he sucked in a breath of cold, stale air.

"Debra?" He wanted to reach for the angelic face floating above him, to touch it, but curiously enough, he hadn't any arms or hands to do so.

"Not Debra."

"Teresa."

"Yes."

He smiled drunkenly. "I'm dead."

"Then I must be as well." He frowned at the faulty logic of that.

"Alive," she said and kissed his forehead with her sweet, innocent little prost.i.tute's mouth. "Alive."

Her face was so perfect and unnatural and he so wanted to touch it and make her real to him once more. But where were his hands?

"I can't move," he complained.

"Your back is broken."

"Paralyzed."

"For a time."

He frowned at the news; it seemed frowning was all he could manage. "How?"

"You fell. I watched you."

"You were there...?"

"I stood helplessly by the banks of the Hudson and watched you fall. I took you down to the docks, and from there--here."

He tried to turn his head, to see what this place was, but that was too much. "Where's here?"

"A safe place I've brought you to hide you. He won't find you here. Even Amadeus the Mad does not know this city as I do."

He saw a jungle of colorless waterpipes and shattered plaster in cookie-cutter patterns, cobwebs like shorn, ancient ghosts, or silk. He smelled old water and rust and the musty befurred things which moved busily in the walls. Above came the gentle clapping of things with blunt nighttime wings. They were in the attic s.p.a.ce of some old coldwater brownstone, he was willing to wager, but as to where in the city, if indeed they were even still in the city, was anyone's guess...

"How long...?"

"A long time, Alek Knight. Three days and you've slept them through. How do you feel?"

"I don't."

She leaned over him and kissed his mouth, and it was terrible for he could not feel the essence of her breath on his dead traitor of a body. He heard from far down below, somewhere in the belly of the building, a roar of voices suddenly. Anger.

Human anger. Something shattered against a wall, and then there were more oaths and cries of violence. Yet he could not force himself to concentrate on them.

He was lying on a mattress or cot of some kind, Teresa's cot, he surmised, with Teresa hovering near, her flesh white and bare to his touch. Her voice, her scent--they seemed to raise his sensitivity until the room itself throbbed with painfully acute life. He saw something long and slender flash in her delicate hands, and for a moment he thought he was doomed. But then "It's time to heal," she whispered in her Jezebel's voice and she pressed the edge of the straight razor she held in a br.i.m.m.i.n.g black line between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s as if what she offered him was death and not life itself. Carefully, through her persuasions, he kissed her flesh and tasted her angel's blood, felt it fill and begin to heal the ruined sh.e.l.l of his body.

So good. But he was so tired. His mouth slackened early, his body relaxing on the meager mattress beneath him and slowly filling with the things he'd thought he'd forgotten--warmth and chill and dull, wretched pain-- as his body came alive around him to torture him for his reckless abuse of it.

He shuddered violently and tried to reach for her. "Teresa..."

"Shh." He felt her kiss his bloodstained lips. "Sleep and grow strong, my beautiful lost one." Her lips kissed his eyelids to closing and in time he slept. And when his dreams and memories came once more they were only of her.

"I dreamt things," Alek said when next he awoke to the sounds of violent activity below. He looked around the attic s.p.a.ce and found her sitting in a rocker beside his sickbed. On a table between them were packages of vendor's food wrapped in white paper and string. Like Elijah's raven she had brought him something to eat and helped him sit up now to do so. He sagged like a stringless puppet against the headboardless wall, his body a nest of tingling points of pain.

"You're better," Teresa said. "What did you dream?"

Through a white haze of dust her face was ghastly, perfect, beautiful. White skin, black eyes, black, black hair, her delicate body now hidden away by an unidentifiable sheath of some ancient cloth. It looked medieval, or it was only the fact that she wanted it to. Her glamour. He wanted so to touch her and make her real in all her dangerous allure, and to his surprise he found he could. Every gesture of his fingers on her hair and face was an agony, but the pain was fine; nothing felt worst than feeling nothing at all. "We were walking on Fifth Avenue in the daylight," he said groggily, "and it was spring." He smiled with precision. "All the old Greek vendors were selling their tulips. And I bought you--"

"An ice cream cone," she said. "And I ate it."

He frowned. "You can't remember another's dreams."

"Another's, no. But yours I see." She kissed his hand, licked the tips of his fingers like a fawning pet. "I see it the way you've dreamt it, just like I see what became of your unfortunate friend."

Akisha, ancient Akisha...

"Yes, caro," she said, "I know. Slain by the hand of Amadeus."

Dear G.o.d, Akisha--but he'd never meant-- "Yes, I know."

He erupted into shameless, uncontrollable sobs then, and she allowed for it, cradled his face to her perfumed hair. She stroked his face and let his tears baptize her with their purity, and when it was finished and his grief weak and used up she eased him back as carefully as if he was some fragile, valuable old doll.

She leaned forward, her gown rustling, and wiped a tear from his cheek. "And now?" she prompted.

"Nothing." He shook his head. "It's all been in vain."

"No. Byron's picture. We have a map to the Chronicle."

He laughed miserably. "We have nothing, Teresa."

But her smile was clever and ancient and seductive, as always. "We have you."

It took him a moment to understand what she meant. "I can't," he said at last. "I can't do that."

Down below something crashed against a wall and a woman screamed.

"You will," she said.

The paper she found in the scattered debris of the boiler room was really a sprawling flier for the 1993 Coney Island Oktoberfest. He turned the aged flier to its blank-faced side on the slate she'd propped against his knees. He looked at it, its desolate whiteness, tried to picture Byron's map there, its simple, exact artwork. Simple, so simple, yet one wrong stroke would skew the whole d.a.m.ned thing out of focus. He took a pen from his breast pocket, put it to the paper, stopped.

"I can't do this," he repeated. "I can't f.u.c.king draw apples anymore."

"You must," Teresa told him, standing in her medieval gown, her black eyes watching him with a determination that was G.o.dlike in its absolute purity.

"I'm a hack, Teresa," he whispered the awful truth.

"You are a gifted artist. A Bauhaus in your violent soul."

"I don't believe you."

"Try." Her eyes narrowed, saying other things the nature of which he wished he could pretend did not exist.

Do it, her eyes said, do it or you will not walk out of here alive, slayer.

Alek thought of the straight razor, hidden away here somewhere in her loft. He lifted the pen and put it to the paper once more. His hand trembled, the pen almost too much weight for it to bear as dozens of lifeless Bosch jobs flitted through his mind. Dank. Useless. Hopeless...

"Then was then," she uttered softly as she took her seat beside the bed. "Now is now..."

Now, this thing now, his magnum opus, his greatest work, the one that would hang in no gallery on no wall, would gain no coverage, no criticism, would be seen by no one. The work that might save their lives if not their souls. This then. Well, all right.

He caught his breath, put his pen to paper and began to draw. "Talk to me," he muttered, "tell me things to keep me sane."

"Such as...?"

"Anything. Anything at all."

She was silent a moment. Her eyes glowed white in the dark, and then blinked out. And then she said, "I arrived in this city almost thirty years ago, but it might as well be yesterday, or tomorrow. I had never been away from the convent until then, but survival has a way of educating you in the ways of the world, doesn't it? Paris was dead by then, of course, and so I had no protection. I soon found as well that I had nothing to offer the city but my eternal youth and body, both of which were greedily accepted. I slept in Grand Central Station my first day in town and sold myself the following night in order to get up enough money to afford a room at a flophouse.

"I didn't think much about what I was doing, just did it and took their life and their money, used to lending out my body for a few sweaty moments in Rome, and returning to it later, when the beast was satiated. The priests had trained me well for the life I was to lead. The only difference between the a.s.sembly line of eager men who wanted me and the priests at the Vatican was that if I left them alive I never had to see the men again.

"And they paid me. Well, most of the time they paid me.

"Sometimes they refused to pay, shaking the money under my nose before stuffing it back in their pockets, daring me to do something about it. Sometimes they grew ugly and slapped me around or tried to strangle me. I never knew who was going to turn psycho on me, but one thing was for certain--they all paid for their offense. One old grandfathery gentleman put a straight razor to my throat and told me he was the reincarnation of Jack the Ripper and he was going to disembowel me. He wasn't quick enough. Paris had given me a knife of iron as a wedding present and taught me how to use it."

She hesitated. "They always seemed to grow ugly when they were done. Up until then they were usually polite. I saw the pattern emerge. It was always the polite ones who turned on you, as if they were punishing you for their own weakness, making you feel worthless only to feel their own worth again, trying to make you powerless to convince themselves that they weren't powerless against their own s.e.xuality.

"I worked freelance for decades before meeting Rapper and his girls. He's a kind man for a pimp, understanding but firm, and he knows how to keep his girls in order with just the right combination of intimacy and intimidation. In all the time I have spent in his stable, I have never known a girl to cheat him.

But whether it is fear or love or some alchemical combination of the two responsible for such loyalty, I cannot say. I have come to think of Rapper as the Bishop I didn't dare disobey at the Vatican. He f.u.c.ks me the same as the Bishop did, but only occasionally, and without the hostility and brutality the churchmen always brought to my bed. He makes me feel protected, something I haven't felt since Paris..."

She stopped speaking. She was watching him with tears in her eyes.

Alek let his pen drop and tried to pretend he didn't hear the violence downstairs rattling the bones of the old building. "You use him--them--for your Bloodletting," he whispered. "You're letting them take it, aren't you?"

Her eyes blinked closed and a woman wailed plaintively, the sound rebounding against the walls of the brownstone like a gunshot. "The city takes my years and I take its jaded life; I think it a fair trade until the day when I finish Paris's work."

"I'm sorry," he whispered only. Nothing else seemed appropriate. He studied his work, felt the throbbing pressure of tears. For whom? For himself? For Teresa and her plight? For his own Phyrric victory? He didn't know; he only knew the map was too good for this foolish whelp to have created. He knew only that wherever she was, Akisha looked down on the work with approval.

He lay back against the wall and rested his eyes as she came forward to take the map from him. She studied it for many moments, but he did not look at her witch-white face, looked instead at the idiot walls around him and shivered violently. The air here was ancient and oppressive. Moist airlessness falling in around him from all sides like the carefully set stones of a royal sepulcher. Another cry echoed up from below, a whimper like a beaten child makes, and he was choking, dying inside, dry-drowning. He made a wretched, animalistic noise in his throat.

She touched his face and the contact stopped his shudders. "Leave now," she commanded. "The man in you needs to see the sun."

He hesitated, a ridiculous paranoia eating away at his heart. What if he left and something tragic happened?

He had absolutely no luck in protecting his women, he knew that.

She sensed it. "I'm safe; go above."

He rose obediently. It was truly amazing, the new strength he felt in his legs. He saw the way out in her mind and felt her will usher him through the mildewy labyrinth of rooms and down the stairs to the sh.e.l.led-out lobby of some abandoned Eastside project.

The world had changed while he'd slept. Where once it had only seemed weary and obsolete, now it was full of monsters. The vendors looked like terrifying mannequins with their arms continuously reaching; padding dogs on leashes smiled at him with their enormous werewolf teeth, old Czech men grunted and swept the snow from their stoops, reminding him of wax duplicates of Bela Lugosi he'd seen in museums.

Monsters. Monsters everywhere.

Like the one he had made an alliance with.

Like the one that had slain Akisha.

He swallowed. Akisha was dead. Still dead. Dead for a whelp that had not visited her except as Death in over twenty years. And all because Amadeus had made their conflict an open forum. All because of me, he thought.

He trooped up the avenue, breathing in the salt of his tears and the sweet decay of the city. He had some vague notion in his mind of spending his meager remaining bankroll on some decent piece of steel at the Gun & p.a.w.n shop up avenue, but when the heels of his hands struck the door of a tavern on the avenue called Tookey's he realized that this was his true destination all along.

He'd never been in a tavern this far south, but he found Tookey's to be homey, carpeted, leathered, almost a cafe but for the group of uptown escorts cl.u.s.tered around a small round table near the door, drinking cheap espresso and gossiping on their off-time.

The ladies looked up at his approach, two blondes and a dark brunette, all bleached and battleworn, cigarettes clenched in beartrap grimaces, cold dresses, heatless skin. Veterans, yet not a one could be said to be more than twenty-two. He moved on past.

The barkeep was elfish and middle-aged, with hairy, long-fingered hands that drummed and jittered to the rhythm of the Alice Cooper song on the jukebox. "How you doin', buddy?"

Terrible.

"Fine," Alek answered immediately. "Long Island Ice Tea?"

The elf nodded and went to work, whistling along with Cooper's obsession with those poisonous kisses he was so in love with.

Alek turned his back on the man and his mad, merry whistling. Through the streaky cafe window he watched the sun rest between the Twin Towers on its downward path. He counted the cash in his wallet, hating himself for doing this now, hating Akisha more for dying and pushing him off the wagon.

The sun went red on his face with its leaving.

Hating Amadeus the most, he decided, his web, his nightmare. Burning with hatred for the subhuman creature with his empty eyes and hollow heart-- The ladies at the table rose and helped each other into their coats.

Poisoned with hatred for the un-thing that had taken every last thing of any real value from him-- The ladies paid for their drin k s and headed for the door, and he suddenly stopped hating and he suddenly stopped breathing at the sight of the tall brunette looking his way and flipping her ragged long hair over the collar of her red leather jacket. She smiled at him and toyed with the gold ring on the chain around her neck, turning it so it flashed the burning red light of the fading sun in his eyes.

Alek shut them a moment. Moments later, he blinked them open and saw she was leaving. Forgetting the drink, forgetting everything, he rolled the money in his fist and approached her, grabbed her by the arm and turned her around.