And then she touched his hand and her touch seemed to animate him as well, and he rose up, weak but alive, weak but walking, however awfully. And away they ran, leaving the mulling confused humans and the law officials to wander the tunnels and wonder about monsters and war and the underworld and all its coveted secrets.

19.

The two swords kissed like crossed lightning and Sean squinted against the sudden pa.s.sion of sparks which briefly lit the Great Abbey, the altar of skulls, and his master's face. Recovering, he pushed against the Father's sword and felt him give, but it was all a ruse; Amadeus moved with the fluid, boneless grace of a snake, his face stern but otherwise without emotion. His blade slid down, holding Sean's back, until their guards met. He ducked and spun, controlling his student's blade with his own even then, turning to face him, but now slipping inside his sword arm. It had been one swift, unbroken motion from the moment they clashed, and he completed that movement now as he brought his katana around, stopping just short of decapitating Sean, and rested the sharp of the blade on his collarbone. Sean gave up. He dropped the sword of the slayer Alek Knight and whimpered and fell into a quaking bundle, arms steeling his head against the sword which must now fall. It would be the gentlest whistling in his ear, he thought, followed by a pain that would not be pain, that he would not know long enough to be pain.

He waited for it.

Nothing.

He hurt, man. He hurt bad. His eyes ached from his fearful tears and his chest from the greedy amounts of chilled Abbey air he was swallowing. The bones in his arms rang still from the continuous meeting and balancing of his master's blade. "Spar with me," Amadeus had commanded in a dead white voce sotto when Sean had returned alone, the only survival of that s.h.i.tpile of a mission. And he had known what the Father meant. Spar with be. Only it wasn't going to be just any sparring match. It was going to be war, a ma.s.sacre, h.e.l.l on earth. The Stone Man's remittance for a mission well f.u.c.ked up.

Knight was still out there somewhere. And Takara and Kansas, two of the best and oldest slayers in their Coven were dead. Did he deserve anything less?

And now pain swelled his body and challenged the seams of his skin. His bones were dust. His blood was heated to a fine red mist. He was dead and he didn't know it yet. And now the Father would finish what he had begun.

"Sean," said Amadeus, "pick up your sword."

Sean's breath wheezed in and out of a ribcage that had grown too small for him suddenly. "No more...please...I can't, I f.u.c.king can't--"

Some cold thing touched his face, and he whimpered once more like a whipped dog and dropped forward onto his face. He crawled away on his belly, his blistered, bleeding fingers finding purchase in the cobbles and carrying him along until he felt a shadow cover him at last. Shelter. He huddled under the Coventable, cold, painfully afraid. And there, oblivious to the other slayers, Book and Robot and Aristotle watching from the shadowy nooks of the Abbey, he sobbed weakly like an eight-year-old child and pushed the back of his hand across his nose to wipe away the drivel. But it clung stubbornly to his face and he could not seem to rid himself of it any more than his memories or his fears.

He sobbed harder with his frustration and the sob lengthened and became a long dry howl that was answered against every stone wall of the Abbey and rippled the tapestries and rattled the stained gla.s.s like a curse.

The crosswords over the priest's door clattered down noisily.

"Sean."

He howled again.

"Sean."

He covered his face with his hands, splitting his fingers to see out.

"Hush," said Amadeus. As he watched, the Father went down on his knees and pushed his weapon aside.

One of his long thin hands unfurled like a spider toward him.

Sean looked at the hand incredulously. "I'm af-fraid..."

The pale eyes of the Father narrowed. "You believe this exercise to be a punishment for your failure to bring me the rogue?"

Sean shrugged, licked at the blood on his tattered index finger. "I...I f.u.c.ked up righteously, man, I know that," he said, and his voice was too young, too whiny, and he hated it. Hated himself. Hated his mother and Slim Jim and Alek Knight and all the other f.u.c.king people who had ever made him feel small and afraid and made him whine like a little t.u.r.d. Everyone but the Father, who'd been different, better. Was different. Was better. He thought.

"Beloved, you think things have changed? That I am not the same who came to you in the beginning?" And his beautiful leonine face was so honest and puzzled and hurt that Sean felt his fear simply wash away with the Father's words. "You think that you have failed me for all time? That redemption is beyond your agile hand?"

Sean looked at the offered hand poised to receive and not to hurt. Tentatively he put his own into it and felt the dry white bones close gently, firmly over it.

Amadeus rose and drew Sean out of his hiding place and up, up into the soothingly warm yellow lights of the chandelier. And when they stood, close now, so close their shoulders nearly touched, Amadeus drew his acolyte's wounded fingers to his mouth, licked at their bloodied tips. He paused with his lips freezing against Sean's palm, his hungry eyes unwavering from Sean's face. "You are my creature now," he whispered. "Mine, as nothing before has been mine, as nothing will ever again he mine. You belong to me, Stone Man.

You are my own. And I do not slay my own."

Sean's eyes fluttered dreamily at the Father's words, and he felt the last threads of his fear and his failure fall away. His lips parted dryly and the voice which came out was new, different, a voice he'd never heard before in cadence. "I would...would do anything for you, Father, even...even die for you," he confessed.

"I know. But I want you to live for me. Live to take the head of my Judas." Amadeus smiled and kissed the tips of Sean's fingers, each one in succession, like a ceremony. Then his lips fell away and Sean stood alone once more. He shook his head as he came back to himself with a resounding thunderclap of despair going off in his heart. "But...what if I can't do it?"

"You will. I will train you and you will. Alek is weak. He will never be one with the sword because there is a part of him which will always despise the sword. But you, Stone Man, you have a talent for the sword for your love of it, for your love of battle. You are my Chosen now, my champion."

Sean scuffed absently at the floor with the toe of one worn sneaker, studied the cobblestones and the pattern of ancient bloodlike mortar between them. "Am I as good as Alek now?"

"Better. A thousand-fold better."

"Really?"

"I am no liar."

Sean smiled and his smile grew into a grin.

Amadeus nodded at the fallen sword. "Pick up the weapon. We begin again."

Sean shook his head, as his smile melted away. "I can't. That sword's way heavier than my old one." He ma.s.saged his arm thoughtfully. "And it makes me feel...I don't know, funny inside when I hold it."

Amadeus frowned as he retrieved his own sword. "How do you mean?"

"Like," Sean shrugged, "you know how a strange dog'll growl at you and get all hackly and stuff?"

The Father's frown changed into a look of pure puzzlement, as if Sean had begun to speak in a strange language even he did no understand.

"Like it doesn't like me or sumpin', you know?"

"No, I do not know. It is only an instrument. Like your old one. Pick it up," he commanded, a.s.suming a light combat stance, feet wide, sword leveled against his forearm. "Pick it up and make it a part of you."

Feeling the eyes of the others burning on him like unseen little flames, Sean went and retrieved the sword. He picked it up, holding it as he was taught to, and yet again he fe l t the familiar wrongness of its weight and feel in his hand. Like it was alive, a living thing, a pet with teeth left in the hands of a stranger with whom it has no relationship. No interest in being with.

Slim Jim had had a dog like that, Sean remembered now. A big black motherf.u.c.ker named Animal that hated anything that moved. The beast used to bring ragged pieces of unidentifiable flesh back to the Shangri-La like some dogs brought back branches or b.a.l.l.s. All of Jimbo's girls were afraid of Animal, all but Sean who had never given a s.h.i.t how big he was or how many people he'd taken down. Jimbo turned Animal loose on Mom once, and that had been a farce, hadn't it, with Mom screaming her G.o.dd.a.m.n head off and ramming a broomstick at Animal's head, and where would she have been were it not for Sean spotting her stiletto on the nightstand and using the psi to send it through the back of Animal's left eye, hey?

Now for some reason he recalled that incident. The sword--it was like somebody's watchdog turned loose on him, obeying him (reluctantly) but hating him with all its guts and more, if that were possible. He thought about all that Knight had said to him on the sub and begin to wonder if there weren't some truly f.u.c.king weird things going on.

"Ah, Father?"

"What is it?"

"Who the h.e.l.l is this Debra b.i.t.c.h? Knight said she's coming back, whatever the h.e.l.l that means."

"Little time," Amadeus said. "We fight."

The Father parried an underhand strike. Sean met the sword the best he could. Steel shrieked against steel and slid away. The rebound of the lunge nearly put Sean on his a.s.s. Luckily, He hit the back of the Coventable and caught his balance and leaned over to catch his breath. "Do you...do you know where those two lollipops are, huh?"

"Not yet. But soon. Denn die toten reiten schnell."

The slayers hovering at a distance shifted like shadows and chirped to each other like the surviving bats in the Abbey.

"Denn die-what?" Sean said, eyeing their glowing white distant eyes.

Amadeus smiled and struck savagely once more. "'For the dead travel fast.'"

Asleep she seemed younger, more vulnerable, and he had to keep reminding himself that it was only her spell. Sitting on the mattress beside her with his back propped against the wall, Alek skated the chunk of coal over the blank side of an old flier in staccato bursts of black. It was good, the purest thing he'd drawn in years. But perhaps that too was her spell; certainly, her face had had the power last evening to stop curious commuters all the way to topground.

"'The Devil hath power/To a.s.sume a pleasing shape,'" she said suddenly, coming alive at his side and turning over so the shadows were off her face.

"Dante?"

"The Bard. I detest the goths." Her black, unnatural eyes were open now, and sitting up now she was once more a great, perfect doll, sinister and animated.

"Dante believed that all the world's devils go back in their box in the ground during the day," she uttered, stretching like a cat, skin taut over strong muscle and deceptively delicate bones. Unlike him, she slept naked, unashamed--if, indeed, shame had ever been a element of her spirit, even as a young woman. He seriously doubted it. Her flesh was pierced in some places, scarified in others, the scars an art in themselves that drew his eye again and again. Yet nothing about her repulsed him anymore, nothing at all. Quite the contrary...

She looked on him as if reading his thoughts. Her skin, her hair--white satin, black silk. But unlike her clientele, he had touched her not at all while they slept at either ends of this common bed. It wasn't that he didn't feel the itch. Even now he did. Particularly now as she all but offered herself up to him like a living sacrifice. But she was right, after all. To love her, to be beloved of her--how could he keep the ghost in the picture on the wall over their heads from intruding? "I only wish you could be with me there, even then, in the dark of day."

"I'm with you now."

"No," she said, "not even now. He reaches down from above and she stands below with wings outstretched and Alek Knight hangs between two devils, the white one and the black."

He looked away from her, lest she see his despair and his rage. The white devil. The devil with the white eyes. But they were so dark, so tainted with his six hundred years of blood, his wrath of holy fire and the twisted lies of his life. Alek's fist clenched compulsively and the carbon turned to silt that trickled darkly between his white fingers and fell across the white sheets like soot.

"I'll kill the b.a.s.t.a.r.d," be whispered. "This is all I'll endure. This is it."

"Vengeance."

"f.u.c.king war. He killed Akisha and he killed Debra. I've carried this so long. But not anymore." He opened his hand and the wind whispering through the boarded-over windows took the black powder and scattered it.

He grimaced, tasted copper like a Eucharist of metal on his tongue. The taking of the Host before battle.

"I'm going to make the prophecy real. I'm going to serve up the motherf.u.c.ker's head to the church and whatever G.o.d he serves."

Teresa narrowed her vixen-eyes on him like a high pagan priestess bestowing a benediction upon a favorite warrior. "You would spit in the face of Lucifer." She smiled. "At last."

Alek studied his sketch, the lines drawn so perfectly to scale, the graceful curve of her cheek, her breast, her black, beautiful insectoid eyes. He crumpled it and tossed it away. Beautiful but insubstantial like all the work of his life.

He could see. Finally.

Awakened, as Akisha called it.

He stood up and found his coat and put it on like the battle armor it felt so much like to him. He adjusted the leads in his coat to accommodate the weight of Takara's sword. Lastly, he found the map and glanced at the spot circled in red ink. Tonight's destination.

There was no pain now in his knee. There was no pain anywhere in his body but in his heart. He set the map aside and turned to study the picture hanging like an angel over the bed. And as Teresa slid out of bed and dressed for the evening, he felt his smile mimicked that of Debra's. Devious. Predatory. Secretive. The look of the ancient and the wronged and the powerful. He felt taller and as dark and manifest as an open abyss.

And somehow he knew as soon as he took those first certain steps outside that those who stood in his way would move aside immediately for reasons completely unbeknownst to them.

Together they descended the stairs to the city.

The hunt was again on.

Less than an hour later Alek's back was pressed to the deep alley's flank of the Empress as if he would read the song of her walls. And of all the off-off-Broadway opera houses, he thought, surely she had the darkest of melodies; celebrity and scandal, she was a place of innocent entertainment and calculated political attack.

He had read somewhere that she'd fed the tabloid well at the turn of the century, back when social angst was as fashionable as padded corsets or Derby hats. She'd petered off after that, gaining a little recognition as something of a sordid vaudeville stage frequented by soldiers on leave during the Second World War. She'd been little better than a boulevard rattrap in the beginning, but she'd transfigured with each transferring of hands. Theatre to museum house to antique emporium to government record house to temporary Department of War Defense outpost. On and on...until she'd come full circle in her cycle.

Of course she wasn't quite the same. Gone were the hosts of preening, posturing members of society lining her stairwell of crumbling cantilevered stone, the women in fur and jacquard, the cowed husbands in spats who carried canes with beast's heads of real silver, all of them there to see and be seen. Now only the poor and the bored and a handful of aspiring Thespians attended her nightly amateur productions, attracted to her history, perhaps, or only the sinister smile of her cornices.

The scarred orange brick was cold against his shoulders, stubbornly thick and secretive. Still, if the Chronicle was anywhere it must be here. It had to be here. He looked around tentatively, tried with the whole of his power of sight to feel this derelict Eastside block full of Pakistani grocers and Asian nightclubs and abandoned railyards. A few doors down, in the doorway of a deli, a black man in a tattered green field jacket scalped a roast chicken with enough c.o.ke stuffed inside of it to keep the Forty-second District busy for the next three years. Further on a lonely woman in a coldwater flat cried herself to sleep. Alek tried to reach beyond these human tragedies, looking for the supernatural cancer in the body of the city that would indicate a slayer or two.

So far nothing.

He felt relieved.

The b.u.m sleeping behind the meager protection of a Dumpster at the back of the alley turned over and muttered something whiskey-soaked and incomprehensible. Alek ignored the man and tipped his head back against the wall. The stars flitted like stop-signals in and out of sight through the choking blanket of nighttime smog overhead. "Nothing," he whispered. "I think we have enough time if we don't dawdle. Maybe."

Teresa said nothing, only gazed up at the abused cornices with their wicked Corinthian relief as if she were wondering about its secrets the same as he. She breathed in deeply, taking the air and all the data it carried in through her sensitive Jacobson's organ, seeing the unseeable the same as he, but with a process more natural than he was used to. Finally she said, "You dread this game, caro, yes?"

"I'd like to dig Byron up and kill him again. Yeah," he muttered. "I'd also like to get my a.s.s down to Port Authority and get a one-way ticket on the longest line out." He rubbed his arms nervously and started out after her retreating figure. "But I guess we need that G.o.dd.a.m.n book first."

He got no answer from her and expected none.

They followed the antique iron guardrail to the back stoop stage entrance. And there they encountered a punk heavy dressed in a tuxedo that looked scarcely able to hold in the force of the man's raw gym muscle.

Tux reached out and thumped the plain of his palm over Alek's chest, halting him. His piggy eyes shrank still more in his r uddy, bald face. His bicycle mohawk stood up proud and blue like the quills of a particularly threatening and unusual porcupine. He eyed Alek with contempt. "No way. No one goes back there without a pa.s.s. 'Specially not bag people like you, you read, homeless? Soup kitchen's down da avenue."

Alek looked down at the hand holding him back. A colorful viper tattoo meandered along its meaty back, lending a dazzling three-dimensional illusion of the snake creeping out of Tux's sleeve. He thought absently of Erebus, another hulk of a creature, and the damage he usually had to deal the man to get past. Should he fear this then, he wondered, this colorful character with his big words and bad judgment? His hand came up, ready to s.n.a.t.c.h and break the man's arm, to tear his hand off at the wrist if he had to. Because he could.

Because, really, this was the only way to deal with these types.

But in the end he stopped and dropped his hand, remembering Teresa's glamour, the spell so easily woven by her. The power that protected them from Amadeus's all-seeing eyes in her nest, the power that had beaten back even Takara's illusions enough for Teresa to plant her knife in the slayer's belly. Alek turned his eyes up into the punk's face. "Please," he said, gaining an impression of the man's ill-defined anger being artistically channeled into this bizarre job. "We need to go inside."

"Wa.s.samatta, you stupid? Scram. Don't make me angry..."

Alek narrowed his eyes. Anger. Anger was innocent death, the broken chain before its time, anger was a thousand voices calling for the blood of Aragon, a monster, a man made G.o.d by the church and unchained among the weaker ma.s.ses like a wolf among sheep. Anger was the covenant sealed between creature and creator when all the vows were nullified. Anger was a strike to the face, not wounding but as sharp as a drawn sword...

Tux fell back, untounched, against the back stage door and slumped down, leaving the way completely open for them. Alek stepped over the man and into the wings. The expression on his face might have been religious agony, but Alek did not look close enough to know for certain.

20.