He shivered once more, but helplessly this time. He'd feared the altar once, the way a child would. But then Amadeus, ever patient and curious of his child's mind, his fears, had taken him before her one day, his voice soft and wise in Alek's ear. Fear her, my acolyte? Why she is the symbol of our great Covenant with the children of men, that the horror and slaughter of our brethren during the Crusades shall not be repeated. The altar--do you see?--is that supplication, the tower who crawls ever upward together with her sisters all over the skin of this world, working towards that final pinnacle where one day at last the glorious face of Peter's church will not be denied us and absolution for our many heinous sins will be ours Are you now so afraid of her, my best child?

He never feared her again after that, only what she contained. He'd never feared anything, if he wanted to be honest with himself, except the Father's disappointment. He'd read the books of the Covenant and he had taken upon himself its bitter truth and its ordinance and priestly vows of celibacy and obedience. A good student, he memorized every word of the diatribe and fought the secularism which had threatened the core of the Coven in the early seventies. Faith had been lost, and found. But some things, like ceremony, preserved.

Many slayers said the New York City Coven was old-fashioned, its Covenmaster too static to push his acolytes through the tribulations of the new millennium--and yet their enclave was more successful statistically than all of the Covens in all of the states put together. So perhaps there was something to be said for being old-fashioned.

He genuflected, once, briefly, and sent up a short prayer for Empirius's soul, then turned and descended the steps to the nave.

And there he stopped.

Father Amadeus sat in the shadows at the head of the Coventable, his hands pinnacled under his chin, his eyes cast downward upon an ancient jade chessboard crowded with tiny figures shaped in silver or bronze as animals. Horses for knights and mice for p.a.w.ns. The kings and queens were cats with sparkling amber eyes.

They'd played such games in the past, he and the Father, yet never with this antiquated set. For a moment the little board intrigued Alek, frightened him, and stopped his concentration.

The Father looked up as Alek approached. His appearance was that of a man of thirty-three or -five, the same as Alek. Yet his face and hands and his flood of wintry hair was bleached to the whiteness of bone, his unevolved skin almost translucent over a vast blue webwork of veins and arteries that contrasted like marble against the blackness of his habit. So much so, in fact, that most of him seemed suspended in the dark, ephemeral, unnatural. And old. He lifted his pale lapis blue eyes and Alek felt the mental tug binding his thoughts to something far vaster, far older than his own mind.

These are bad times, Amadeus said.

In deference Alek remained where he was. He frowned. Yes, there was something wrong, terribly, horribly wrong. This silence, the chessboard with its unfamiliar army-- "Peace," said Amadeus. His silk habit shivered as though alive as he rose from his seat. Standing now as he was, no creature that Alek knew, including himself, could help but be awed by the Covenmaster's presence, his erect, aristocratic form rising like a statue of stone and obsidian from the floor, immovable, fearful in its Giovanni-touched beauty. Alek frowned, his mind engaged in memory and loss so deep and profound he found he had to cast about for a suitable reason. Finding none, he finally fixed on the disappointment of the Braxton show earlier that evening.

The Covenmaster moved toward him with hypnotic grace and touched the back of his long clawlike fingers to Alek's cheek, dispelling those thoughts. The feeling was ash, a freezing burn that emanated like an aura of light from the tips of Amadeus's fingers. Alek found it impossible to turn away, frozen as he was in the glare of those silver eyes, the glitter of such bone-hard fingernails on his flesh. Amadeus smiled knowingly and Alek felt the blood rush to his face, his heart pounding in his ears with a foreign rhythm that he realized after a moment was mimicking that of his master.

"Beautiful," the Covenmaster said as his misshapen talons whisked across Alek's cheek. Then he dropped his hand. Alek managed to turn away, mortified by the simple word, and instead fixed his attention on his master's back as Amadeus went to the edge of the nave and began lowering the rutted wagon wheel chandelier on its rusted orange chain. It fell in painfully rusted increments until it hung like a wreath before the altar. And now, free of enchantment, Alek couldn't help but wonder where that wagon wheel had roamed, what lands it might have covered before it had come to reside here. How had it come to be here, of all places?

"Questions. Always questions," Amadeus answered his thoughts. He produced a tinder wand and rasped it against a bedrock wall. "Like Socrates, Alek, the gadfly, the flea in the ear of the magistrates. It is both your blessing and your curse. To thirst for knowledge is like to open oneself up for the addiction of blood." It wasn't quite a reprimand; the Father's voice was too amused for that. He lit the candles in the black bra.s.sy arms of the wheel, a quick certain touch of the wand like a dishonest kiss, turning the wheel as he worked.

Those hands--they were like birds in a ritualistic dance, and Alek found it nearly impossible to believe that this man, Amadeus, the teacher to so many slayers, had never seen a day in his whole long life.

"Something's wrong," Alek said. "Something is wrong. You've summoned me. Why?"

"The others--they have told you this?"

"Yes, but--"

"You knew before that. You always know, nein?" Amadeus's wand guttered to white smoke. He dropped it to the Coventable. He swayed like a white medusa toward Alek, stopped only when they were eye to eye, their shoulders nearly touching. Some great sorrow clung to the man like a rank aura.

What must they look like? Alek wondered. Two versions of the same man, perhaps, but that one mirrored the other negatively. And that other younger and darker and less perfect one? His thoughts enfeebled by a nameless terror clinging to the inside of his mind like the bats to the walls of this abbey. Two men who were so alike and yet so unforgivably separated for the moment. Alek reached, imperfect mind and imperfect soul, for the cloister he knew so intimately and found only a somber place unpeopled by memories. For a moment he panicked in his isolation. Never had it been like this between them, never-- "Father?" Alek ventured. "What's wrong?"

"You were always my best disciple."

The thought made Alek want to collapse, vomiting. He wanted to ask more questions, demand answers and rea.s.surances, but he felt Amadeus's hands again on his face, seeing it more completely now, melting to the flesh and form so that they were like two marble statues seeking reconnection. Those long skilled hands moved slowly over his cheekbones and down into the hollowed valleys of his cheeks, fluttered over his lids and eyelashes so gently he did not blink or turn away. "Alek. My Alek," Amadeus said. "My beautiful eternal one. My magnum opus."

Usually he loved to hear his name on Amadeus's tongue, the harsh tenderness of it, the way the Father's Old World accent accentuated the last syllable and carried the hard last letter down into a click. But not like this.

Not with weariness. Not with regret. He did not want to be called a magnum opus as though he were a finale of sorts.

Alek closed his eyes as Amadeus's mind brushed lightly, deftly, against his own. This was old magic. As a child he'd lain across the Father's lap after their exhaustive daily sparring matches, and with his brow slicked with diamond sweat, Amadeus had touched him like this, seeming to worship his face and the sharpness that had come into it too quickly in his youth. Alek had felt the old Covenmaster's mind then, those terrible first needling which had ached hours afterward, making his mind a swollen cavity filled with the things of Amadeus. But after so many years they were old links now, moving inside each other with all the deftness of ancient lovers.

I speak to you now of secrets.

Father?

Of dark things. Dark times. We must prepare. I shall not be with you much longer, my most beloved.

Alek's heart fluttered against his ribs like a frantic bird battering itself senseless against the iron bars of its cage. For a desperate moment he tried to break the link, to turn away his mind so the Covenmaster would not see his childlike sorrow, but inside this strange private world there were no doors so easy to find. He was trapped, ashamed.

Peace. I have had a vision...

But Alek's mind broke down into a helpless confusion and he felt Amadeus pull back in response, unable to settle in that sudden hornet's nest of fear. Alek blinked against his stinging eyes, pulled away physically and mentally from his master's touch. "I don't understand. What's going on? What are you saying?"

Amadeus shrugged, the gesture horrid, accepting. "You can do nothing to stop this now, nothing at all. I have seen the things to come and they will not be thwarted. The curse of the Seer. It was said in the old world that the Cyclopses of ancient Athens traded one of their eyes to see the future, but the G.o.ds cheated them and all they saw were the time of their own deaths--"

"G.o.dd.a.m.nit, don't tell me stories!" Alek said angrily, leaning against the table. "Just tell me what you saw!"

The Father's dead white eyes floated upward to a point just beyond Alek, as if he was seeing a vision being played out on the pale body of the golgotha. "I saw as always I do in visions: I walked in a familiar place I did not know the name of. I saw--light and shadows and animals weeping in their cages and music and heat and blackened crimson. And I saw a figure in black, his eyes wild with the bloodl.u.s.t. And then a midnight sun rose upon my eye, deadly in its brilliance, and I did not know another day. I knew only the dark that is alien to us all."

Alek shook his head. Amadeus spoke of death. "I...I don't understand."

"Nor do I. But when has that mattered to prophecy?" And with that he simply returned to the table and his seat and his game. Just like that. Fertig. The end.

But no. This, all of this, was stupid. They were immortal, or nearly so. They were chosen by some dark hand of fate to watch from the accursed circle of their kind as the earth devoured the sons and daughters of Eve all around them. Friends, family--time took them all and left behind only cavities. While they, the sp.a.w.n of the Lilith, went on and on without respite into the deep, uncertain tunnel of the future. And Father Amadeus, who had fought perhaps longer than any of them, would be there among them, for them. Amadeus was always there. He had to be. If he was not, Alek and the rest of the converted vampires would probably all go mad without his direction.

Amadeus's hand rested atop a little silver horse. "If only that were so, my beloved. If only I could be at one with my brethren forever. But I know now that the map of my life has been marked. I have been selected to pursue the greatest mystery of all."

Alek wanted to scream at the bulls.h.i.t of all this metaphysical hocus-pocus and n.o.ble double-talk. Death was death. And death without absolution was d.a.m.nation. The Father was wrong. Wrong. Because if Amadeus was to die, it meant that his head was going to be taken. And nothing had the power to take him unaware, no human, no vampire-- But a Judas?

Amadeus glanced up as if hearing the thought.

Alek felt an urge to go over to him. Instead he went to the other side of the board and looked more closely at the little animals. His mind was numb.

"Perhaps," said Amadeus, moving the horse forward, "Someone among us this day may be a Judas." He shook his head. "Strange, but the face is not known to me. There is a curious force afoot, Alek. It hides it from me. My path is chosen, that is all I can say."

Alek shuddered. Was he a fool to feel this? He was no longer a child, he did not want to fear like one, and yet he was. As afraid as an orphan child. How old they were, he thought, and yet how young they remained. "We have a young one to welcome tomorrow," he heard Amadeus whisper. "A promising kinetic. Intriguing.

His name is Sean Stone and I want you with him. Watch him. Your eyes will be mine. I have informed him that he will be apprenticed to you," Amadeus looked up, "for the experience."

Alek toyed with the hilt of his sword, running his fingers up and down the engravings. "Is he some kind of agent?" Suddenly it was all too obvious. A new recruit--some sniper from one of the more liberal hives--let him walk into the trap of his own free will. One false step and he would be prey. If he raked a hand over the altar, Alek could find the heated presence of over a dozen a.s.sa.s.sins executed in the last twenty-some-odd years by his hand. And now perhaps it was this one's turn to join the altar he was supposedly helping to build.

"I must know for certain," Amadeus explained, abandoning the game a second time, this time to sit back and nod solemnly. "We are, after all, something of a dying breed, are we not?"

He nodded obediently.

"Now, I must know: will you do this for me, mein Sohn?"

"You know I will."

"Very good." With the slightest ghost of a smile, Amadeus stood and put his thumb under Alek's chin, urged his face up to the level of his blind gaze. He smile grew both in sorrow and wonder, as if, like his acolyte's reverence for his master, so was the master's for his acolyte. No, but that was impossible. Nothing so great as Amadeus could look upon anything else and not feel as close to omnipotence as an earthbound G.o.d.

"Now, no more ruminations on grief, child. I must know if you are prepared to take my place in the event that you are needed. I have to know if you will be strong for me."

The spit dried in Alek's mouth and for a moment he could do nothing but stare numb and disconnected at his master's narrow, questing gaze. Covenmaster. He shook his head slowly as feelings--mostly utter raw bone- vibrating terror--began to filter back into the byways of his body. "Father," he stuttered, "Father, you--you said this was many years off, if at all, you said-- "We don't have many years anymore, Alek. Are you ready?"

"I--I don't know, this--it's so sudden."

"You know."

"I would try, Father, you know that, but--"

"You must. Close your eyes. Come into the dark with me. Into our secret place."

What he was asking now, not just duty, but communion, the sharing of souls that was so like lovemaking, yet so alien to it too, so much more than it, was overwhelming. All of it, overwhelming. So much so, that instead of falling into the old rhythms they had laid down decades earlier, Alek simply stood there, stunned and swaying, hanging in a place where there was no will, no decisions, no self...

And in that place the Father came to him quietly, his hands falling like ashes upon his acolyte's shoulders.

Amadeus pulled him close, so close they breathed nearly as one and whispered the words of the communion into his mind: Blessed are they who come to my table and partake of my supper. Blessed be...

No, the Father's vision was wrong. Everything was f.u.c.king wrong suddenly. He was here to leave his offering and play a friendly game of chess with his teacher, not learn of his demise, not be told he was next in line for this horrendous responsibility. Covenmaster. When had the world gone so horribly wrong?

But then Amadeus smiled as sadly as an angel and held him for he was quite incapable of standing on his own and stroked his acolyte's cheek, murmuring the soft scalding terms of endearment that had so comforted Alek as a child. Amadeus kissed him as though to savor him, long and lingering, drinking his acolyte in with his mouth, taking the salt from his cheeks, the fear from his words, offering only the breath of comfort on his face, his throat.

At the little place behind his ear Alek felt the tips of a delicate set of teeth graze his skin. He shuddered, thinking of how a big cat breaks the neck of its prey, yet his shudder of expectation did nothing to slake the Father's desire, nor did he want it to. It had been so long. Alek closed his eyes and held on and remembered how awkward he'd felt when Amadeus had first offered him this thing. Twelve, he'd just turned twelve, yes, and it had been the first time in their daily sparring bouts that he had met every deft move of Amadeus's sword with his own. They had come together corps a corps that day, in utter symmetricism, a single ent.i.ty dueling against its doppleganger. And Amadeus, himself breathless, cheeks ruddy with the raw blood of exaltation, declared Alek ripe for that privilege the Covenmaster offered only his most beloved and devout student. And with those words he'd urged his best student to lie back helplessly on the Coventable. Alek had complied at once. Why shouldn't he? What had he to fear from the man who had saved his soul? The man he loved, the man he desired more than anything real or imagined that the world could offer him. And then came the touch of the master's mouth on his cheek, the delicate p.r.i.c.k of a kiss under his chin. He remembered sweating in sudden panic, wary of those teeth and this pa.s.sion and fearful that their relationship would change somehow and Amadeus would not seem the same to him afterward.

And yet once more the Father had shown patience with him, his touch deft and kind and pa.s.sionate and fatherly. He'd been so foolish in his dread, Alek supposed, to fear a little innocent communion, the mingling of blood, and with it, minds. But the scars of his childhood had still been raw, in some places, still bleeding.

Their relationship had changed after that, yes, had gone fathoms deeper, become a separate ent.i.ty it almost seemed, as if they had breathed a living soul into it.

Amadeus held him down against the table, kissed the familiar mark in the hollow of Alek's throat, rasped it open with his sharp catlike tongue. Alek caught his breath and shivered, felt the Father's hand drift over his hammering heart as if he would catch the bird in its cage and calm it. "My beloved," Amadeus sighed, his tongue like cut gla.s.s against the wound. "More than anything ever before, more than anything will ever again be mine. My blood. My soul. My beloved." And now those teeth, primitive and long and deadly as sin, were in his acolyte's vein, and with every throb of Alek's rapidly beating heart, he could feel his master drinking, drawing nourishment from this chalice he knew so well, drawing life itself, and he found quite unexpectedly that he did not care that it might be killing him. At that moment life seemed nothing but a barrier standing between himself and the ultimate knowledge.

He reached out blindly and sent a cotillion of little animals scattering across the Abbey floor. He clasped something enormous and sweet and suffocating above him and held to it with both hands. His eyes were half-masted, running over, seeing the light of the candlelit wheel grow brighter with each pa.s.sing, beating, bloodred moment, the supernova of heat branding his face like the tearfully white fury of the noontime sun in a summer sky in a land he knew not the name of while seeing with eyes that were not his own.

Amadeus. He must hold to Amadeus for whatever time they had now. He groaned inwardly. He wanted to die for Amadeus. He wanted to mourn for all they had, all they would never have, the lessons, the tomes of wisdoms, the words spoken inside their minds and out. On the midnight of his fourteenth birthday Amadeus had taken him to his first opera and made him sit unsquirming until it was over and he was in love with the Bohemian foreverafter. Then afterward, they'd gone to the country and found and bled a rabbit in an act of pa.s.sion that Alek had thought never to share with his master. We are all of two minds, said the Father that night with absolute wisdom. Remember your lessons; they are the clay of your soul.

We are all of two minds.

Two minds...

Amadeus drew back, his tongue skating his bloodstained teeth as if to savor this gift. But it only made Alek feel sad and small. Of all the wards in the world that Amadeus had raised up in the Coven, the men and women, the eternal beings with their eyes full of holy fire, why him? Why was he special?

You were always in my dreams. I loved you before the founding of the Earth. I shall love you always.

"Always..." Alek echoed and watched in awe as the Father skated one long gla.s.slike fingernail down over his own unscathed whiteness of throat, an invitation an d a summoning. Take this and drink. For it is the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. Do this in memory of me, my love.

He dwelled in darkness as he rose up and kissed his master in sadness and reverence, even as that kiss deepened into blood and ceremony. He cleaved to darkness, a blind man, because in the dark he and Amadeus could be the same.

5 >From the very beginning of time her kind had had its rules, its holy commandments of conduct both with mortals and within the circle of its own kind. Perhaps once, in a time before recorded history, vampires had lived by their own simple code of ultimate freedom which might have been summed up in the phrases Do what thou wilt and Judge not lest ye be judged yourselves, but if so, it was a time long since pa.s.sed. Her kind--When had it come so close to the surface of human existence?--had traded in such basic primal rights of predatory survival for the comforts of human companionship. Human responsibility.

Her blood, like so many of her kind, was mixed. Not greatly--not enough to dull the unique doll-like pallor of her face or change the chemical composition of her cells. Her eyes still burned under the fiercest of manmade lights. Her skin still singed at the touch of iron. But there were adaptations, minor evolutions, if you will. The "glamour" of being whatever her client wished was one such example. There were others. But the hunger: that remained, unchanged, in all its trembling, nail-biting fury, if nothing else.

"The fee," said the middle-aged communications conglomerate marketer down from Boston on business this weekend. He had claimed earlier at the Fox and Gla.s.s on Broadway that their latest venture was a combination of cla.s.sical and avant-garde music his firm was hoping would catch on with the post-MTV crowd. Whether or not that was true was not her concern, though she let him talk. Whether or not he spoke the truth about himself was even less her concern.

"Let's not talk about that now," she muttered, her voice groggy with hunger. She could barely get out the words. It had been so long, so long. She'd held back, been a good girl for so many night, too many nights.

And it was, after all, the middle of blue February, tonight the anniversary of the greatest death in her long life, and she celebrated it yearly with all the religious fervor of a pagan priestess on an equinox. "This is your night," she told him. "Your fantasy." She unzipped her motorcycle jacket. "Anything you want."

He told her his desire. His mortal blood was thundering through his veins. She could hear it from across the vast Marriott hotel room like a crest of water tumbling down and away, seething and boiling among the stones. What he wanted was not so unusual. Yet he spoke of it hesitantly. Most of the clients she'd met figured they've paid their money and they owned her for the evening. That they were ent.i.tled to do whatever the h.e.l.l they liked. And they did. Or tried to. They just didn't understand what kind of asking price their requests come with. This man was different only in that he was an obvious novice. For him this would be his initiation into a life he had only ever dared dream about until now. Not since...since the time...she frowned...since the time his mother caught him with those skinrags under his mattress and beat him to within an inch of his life. Her frown leveled out to an impersonal smile. She slipped the links of chain off the catches on her jacket and bound him tight as a collared dog to the bedframe as she whispered innocuous little obscenities into his ear. By now his heart was triphammering at ever pulse point in his firm if aging flesh and making a sheen of sweat stand out like silk on his brow. If he was only a few years older she might fear he could suffer a coronary at any moment.

She licked his brow.

"I have protection," he murmured thickly, dispa.s.sionately, some final attempt at good sense before he plunged over into the rift of this new and exciting nightlife denied him for so long, too long.

She smiled. "I trust you."

"It's--no. For...me..."

She kissed his dry, chapped lips. She could feel his heart throbbing in her mouth, as if it had somehow been relocated there. She bit his lip until it bled and she could taste his wasted life on her tongue. "Don't worry,"

she said. "I have nothing you can catch."

He was oblivious. He reached for her, trying to slide his hands over her nakedness under the leather jacket, then his kisses. But she had lied. Tonight was not what he wanted. Tonight was what she needed. The death she celebrated.

She pulled away abruptly and heard his gasp, felt his body shudder as it reached instinctively for the soul drawing away from him. He looked disappointed by his failed fantasy. But for her there was no physical or spiritual pleasure in the act of s.e.x, nothing but the unique sensation of life alive and throbbing and so near and open to her kiss and insatiable hunger that she had to swallow it whole and make it a part of her.

She moved slowly, tantalizingly, up his body, leaving the prints of her lips on his belly, his chest, his throat.

Beneath her he lay as still as a corpse. She could tell he was trying to control himself, trying to be a good lover. Undoubtedly he had used the same technique for years as he waited patiently for his wife to reach some semblance of satisfaction. Tonight, however, all that wasn't necessary. There was no need to wait. She was ready for him, ready. She whispered painful little kisses over his flesh until there was no more resistance left in him, until he cried out, his body writhing beneath her ,.

suddenly brought back to life. It was then and only then that she grasped his chin in her hand, turned his head sharply to the left, separating the most fragile of tiny bones and the long vital spinal cord, effectively rendering him paralyzed from the neck down, and gave him a razor blade vampire kiss.

"Paris," she whispered thickly through the flow of his crimson warmth.

Booker arrived just before noon the following day for their ritualistic midweek lunch date. Alek shrugged up from his easel at the sound of the well-tempered engine revving under his window and stretched, felt his spine crackle in a dozen little places. Just as well Book was here early; these primaries were going nowhere but in the circular file.

Alek grimaced at the forcefully erotic scratchy image of a nude holding forth an iron apple while tendrils-- possibly electrical cables, he hadn't decided yet--trailed out and upward into a vast toothy skybound machine. Braxton would probably have a cow when he saw it, tell him how hackneyed it looked, and then he'd do his little J. Jonah Jameson-style fit and dance and pull his University Grant off the ticket. And it would be back to guiding yammering, camera-clicking, sticky-fingered tourists from the suburbs through the halls of the Metro for one, Mr. Alek Knight--a.k.a. The Washed-Up Modern Day Dali Of Our Time.

He shrugged. Too bad. Without a second look, he stripped off his wire-frames and pinched the bridge of his nose until the headache that had been forming behind his eyes for the past three hours pa.s.sed. Then he reached for the black wool topcoat draped across the living room futon and headed downstairs and out the alleyside door. There Book waited, his Jag purring like a mechanical panther. Alek dropped into the pa.s.senger side and slammed the silent door hard enough to rattle the driver's side window.

"Do that again, will ya? I think you missed an axle or two."

"Sorry," Alek answered without remorse Book shook his head with infuriating forgiveness. But then he was absolutely the most infuriating man in all the world--pressed to the nines, alert, ready to make a clod of Einstein with his next miracle of science--or otherwise out-charming all those ladies in those tight-a.s.s Andy Warhol-inspired uptown cafes he frequented.

He looked forever elegant, even in jeans. Alek despised him bitterly. He wore his denims and a tan London Fog this hazy afternoon, an aviator scarf swirled carelessly about his neck and camel-leather driving gloves on his tapering, long-fingered hands. The smell of hospital oils mingled with his spicy cologne.

He smiled apologetically and tugged at his pert little slayer's ponytail. "I've been in surgery since six this morning."

"Poor baby."

Book laughed. "The Panda?"

"Of course."