Twenty minutes after his blackout (the beer; it was the beer and the f.u.c.king hot suit) Richie Bellini was back on his feet and hitting the skinny blonde duck with the bad makeup job square it the chest with two fingers and telling him to p.i.s.s off if he knew what was good for him. Bone-headed b.u.ms. When were they gonna learn that the Empress wasn't a country club for the homeless?

The kid in the long black coat with the long yellow hair looked down at the fingers in his chest, looked hack up at Richie. Like so many punks today, he had smart-a.s.s, f.u.c.k-me-why-don't-you eyes. Snowy grey, they were, almost pale. Albino? No. Binnies had pink little bunny eyes. Didn't they?

"Don't touch me," the kid whispered.

Ooooh, a real bada.s.s, this one. Yeah, uh-huh. Richie Bellini, in the long course of his ill.u.s.trious career as gypsy, roadie, punk and brawler, had bounced bi g ger fish than this one, and he knew for certain he was going to have one righteous time roughing over this kindergarten brat. He put on his ugly bulldog face and sneered, "You just hustle a.s.s outta here, buddy. You hear me, a.s.shole? Go home to bed before your mommy and daddy come looking for you." He punctuated each word with a good, hard threatening prod of his fingers.

The kid continued to stare down at Richie's fingers. "Never...touch...me," said the kid, his whiny, nasal Bronx voice digressing into an upper-lip-raising snarl the likes of which Richie had only ever heard from a well-tempered vintage Hog engine set to run. Richie saw the kid's pearly little teeth, and for just a sec he thought maybe the kid was an extra with tonight's troupe--except Richie knew that the Bard was on the run tonight--R&J and not the Scottish Play--and that the guys inside weren't in need of anybody who looked like he'd just dug himself out of his own midnight grave.

What was it with these brats today?

Richie was just about to take the kid by the collar of his really cute Dracula coat and high-fly him out into the street (couldn't weigh that much, the kid; pathetic; anemic, from the look of him) when a hand as long and pale as a latex glove clamped down over Richie's wrist and suddenly burst apart the k.n.o.b of little wrist bones.

The kid laughed like a maniac as the viper's wedgelike head was severed from the rest of its body. Richie felt only surprise at the sight. In all his years as a road warrior and then a heavy--and G.o.d knew there were plenty years there--he'd never come up against a punk that was so white and ridiculously thin and so dammed strong...

Or so looney-tunes, either.

Richie meant to laugh this off like everything else, though what came out was really more like a good, healthy scream of pure, unadulterated terror. A distant part of Richie's brain considered that in his whole forty years he'd never screamed like a pansy before and that his reputation was good and ruined now.

But then Richie's pride was saved when the kid cut off his scream by dragging Richie toward a wolfish open mouth whose stage teeth were far, far too real.

"Where are we?" Alek asked.

"Beneath the orchestra pit, I believe." Teresa studied the map by the muted light of the sole bulb shining in the center of the ancient, musty womb that pa.s.sed for the Empress's prop cellar. "G.o.d but I think I agree with you. I'd like to kill the b.a.s.t.a.r.d again myself."

"Paranoid."

"What?"

"Byron was paranoid. That's why he did this."

Paranoid. Like I am.

Alek unsheathed his sword and went to hover at the bottom of the cellar steps down which they had come, testing the weight of the new sword in his hand, learning its contours in the dark. At its top landing the door was sensibly closed. Beyond it, actors' m.u.f.fled voices were natural and even. Feet stomped to the natural rhythms of script. A drummer hit a ba.s.s drum in dramatic fashion, the sound like m.u.f.fled, far-off thunder.

He glanced around the cramped s.p.a.ce, the sawhorses and busts and pasteboard weaponry and racks of moldering costumes. Here, below, he tried to tell himself, there was nothing to fear but an avenging army of dustbunnies.

Alek shivered, put a foot upon the stairs.

"Someone coming?" Teresa asked him.

"Or I'm just spooked."

She moved wordlessly to one wall, brutally shoved aside a clothes rack, and put the tips of her fingers against its plastered face. "Here."

He checked the cellar door again, saw only a thin inbleeding of light around the edges. He sheathed the sword, then went to the wall, touched it. "Drywall."

"Can you break it?"

He nodded. "Have you read it right?"

"I'm certain."

"But shouldn't there be a regression here?"

"Perhaps they've plastered it. For aesthetics."

His voice sounded thin and desperate, too old and far too young at the same time. And why anyone would worry the appearance of a cellar was a mystery to him, but saying it was over would be giving up and giving in, wouldn't it? Instead, Alek went to the place she had indicated and pressed his palms flat to the wall. He gathered his strength, sensed the broken grain and the living chitter of mice behind the skin-thin barrier, and pushed-- Plaster crackled, rivering through with fissures, and fell into depressions as plaster powder wintered the chilly air. A piece like a ma.s.sive jigsaw came away in his hand and he felt his heart skip a beat, then stop altogether. This was it. This was the place, d.a.m.nit.

He punched through the exposed stud, felt the satisfying crack and splinter of decades-old dry wood. He put his hand into the hole he had made, felt around, then removed it; it came out of the crevice in a shaking, powdery fist. Flagstone.

He touched it, incredulous. "Christ. Why would a theatre company flagstone their f.u.c.king cellar? What the h.e.l.l kind of thinking is that?" Teresa was silent a long, dark moment. Then she sighed as if from the bottom of her very soul, the sound eerie and resonant in this close place. "They wouldn't," she said. "But the government with its banks of wartime secrets would."

"f.u.c.k!" He punched a second bowling-ball-sized hole in the stud next to its sister, did not feel the hurt though his hand bled. He leaned against the wall, closed his eyes against a headache he suddenly couldn't shake.

"There is still one more possibility. Let us waste no more time among this mockery." She turned, graceful and maddeningly calm, and began to ascend the steps.

"You weren't planning on leaving without sayin' goodbye, were you, man?" Sean called from his vantage point on the metal catwalk circ.u.mventing the backstage. Alek looked up, already antic.i.p.ating the sight of the punk's grinning eyes and saluting sword, antic.i.p.ating them the way someone might a badly reoccurring dream complete with closets and bogeyman.

He did not expect the body, however. It fell bonelessly to the floor at Alek's feet, fell like a sack of potatoes with exactly that much life and weight to it. Perhaps it had been human at one time. It was difficult to tell. It just looked like a train-wreck victim with a blue mohawk now.

Alek danced back a step, out of the widening pool of viscous mixed fluids.

The little s.h.i.t smiled down at them. He put his free hand on the safety rail. Then, hardly putting any pressure on it at all, he leapt over the edge of the catwalk and landed in a crouch and a little whoof of air, one hand flat to the rutted oak floor, the other bearing the weight of his sword readily to his inner arm.

His sword? thought Alek. My sword. The little b.a.s.t.a.r.d...

The backstage being an abandoned junkyard of cables and stacked sawhorses and carpentry and mechanical tools, no one was there to notice Sean's grand Shakespearean entry. Not the actors, off in the wings watching the play, nor the propmasters who were also the actors.

The eyes of the Stone Man narrowed to bloodless silver blades. Madness there--worse, sane hatred.

Alek stepped back, almost mincing.

In response, Stone Man straightened up, a six-foot tinkering tower of merciless bone and steel and squealing paten leather. He moved differently. Alek saw that at once. He had that loose-limbed liquid grace one only found in some of the oldest and best-trained warriors. The catlike beauty of a born predator, a born slayer.

He twisted his head unnaturally, like an amphibian catching a fly, and flicked his tongue out at them. "Miss me?"

Teresa edged sideways toward the wings.

Sean licked his lips and smiled at her. "You look delicious, babe. I hope you've got some p.u.s.s.y left over, 'cause after I'm done cutting up your boyfriend here I'll be all yours!" He laughed out a riot of obscene snuffling, choking noises.

Alek drew his sword. Takara's ta.s.seled, feather-light wakizashi felt about as much protection as a large kitchen knife. "You want to cut me, you little s.h.i.t?"

Sean grinned obligingly. "Whatever you want and wherever you want it, you said. Well, I want it here. I want it now!"

"Careful what you wish for," Alek whispered.

Sean lunged, made a cross-handed slice meant to take a few dozen layers of skin off Alek's face. Alek sidestepped him and tried to roll the punk off his shoulder.

He'd always been better in close-up--the curse of the long-limbed. It wasn't the advantage most thought it was. Even a endlessly-legged spider winds up its prey, Amadeus once taught him. And it was that lesson he tried to use. But something happened this time.

Sean caught himself before the throw, swung his blade around so he was inside Alek's swordarm. Alek changed tactics at the last moment, met Sean's blade with his own as it came back around, skidded off it too quickly in his imbalance and heard the tell-tale screek of his blade breaking against the tyranny of Hanzo's blessed sword. It stole the pathetically light j.a.panese dicer from his grip and the meat from his hand. Alek dropped to the floor and rolled out of the way of Sean's crosswise strokes.

Blood on the floorboards now, too bright and too real in this place of makeup and make-believe.

Sean's whinnying filled the wings like the roar of summertime thunder, undercutting the beat of the ba.s.s onstage. "First blood," Alek whispered, finding his feet and binding his hand with the belt off his coat.

Sean came at him again, swinging his sword like a kid up to bat. Alek flattened himself against the floor under the a.s.sault of the swing, dove for Sean's middle. Sean hit the floor on his back with a graceless ooff! of breath.

Sean twisted around, was on him inside a moment, no quarter given, no punches pulled, real streetfighter mode this time, all clawing fingernails and snapping teeth. A fist landed on Alek's mouth, another on his cheek, blackening his vision. He shook himself, and when he could see again the sight that greeted him was hackle-raising--Sean looming--the mouth cranking open impossibly far--the cobralike incisors snapping closed around his throat like a collar. Christ, he'd been practicing. He was using what was at hand. He was getting good-- Sean thrashed like a Rottweiler with a chunk of meat in its jaws.

Alek gasped, heard the material of his coat collar snarl, felt his flesh perforate between the shredder of Sean's jaws. Good, so good--but no master. Not yet. Alek snarled, the sound guttural with the blood bubbling out of his nostrils and foaming through the corners of his mouth, and brought his hands together in a thunderclap over Sean's ears. There came a m.u.f.fled pop as air was forced down both Sean's ear ca.n.a.ls. It shot his equilibrium to h.e.l.l. The wolftrap loosened around Alek's throat and Alek, choking, gasping, finally able to breathe something other than blood, pushed out at his slayer.

They went over like a pair of wrestling alligators locked in a deathroll. Harnessing momentum like once he had beneath Wilma Bessell's a.s.sault, Alek launched the Stone Man off himself. Sean flew back into a sawhorse and destroyed it utterly. He groaned, sat up. He looked, for wont of a better a.n.a.logy, simply p.i.s.sed. He let out his breath in a hiss, got to his feet, shaky but not defeated, and began to circle Alek like a jungle cat searching for a weakness in its intended prey.

Alek found his feet and watched the Stone Man circle around him, keeping a dozen paces between them at all times, keeping Sean always to the front of him. "You're good," Alek spat bloodily upon the floor. "But you're still a d.i.c.kless little whelp."

Sean lifted his sword. With a wet, frothy snarl, he flicked it at Alek's head like a circus dagger.

Alek used his coat to deaden the blow of the blade. The sword clattered down no more than a half dozen feet from the toe of his boot. He tried to grab it up but the sword skittered suddenly, animatedly, out of his reach.

No!

Again he went for it; again the sword jumped like a living thing back toward Sean, making Alek feel ridiculously like a victim of a Charlie Chaplin short, the Derby hat that always seemed to get away and all that. Sean laughed hysterically at the sight and clapped his hands together.

Alek hunched forward, ignoring the heckling, all his concentration on Hanzo's blade, the engravings he knew so well, the storytelling he could feel even now in the palm of his hand. The sword jittered nervously, tried to skip away, being drawn as it was by Sean's mental persuasions. But it wasn't his, G.o.dd.a.m.n it! You should never have been parted from it, came Akisha's whisper. The sword will know its master, said the swordmaster Amadeus.

You know me! You belong to me...!

He threw himself down on the floor, reaching for the hilt, reaching for it the way a child might reach for a particularly shy pet, reaching for it with his hands and his mind and his heart. Reaching--almost-- "s.h.i.t-f.u.c.k!"

--the sword bucked away from him as his fingertips brushed the pommel. Alek jumped to his feet and let out a roar of frustration as the sword slithered away, kicking up sparks on the buckled hardwood floor, sliding with uncanny ease into the mold of Sean's hand. Then Sean was on his feet, laughing riotously, leaping at him, sending him reeling backward through the stage curtain, the whelp screaming laughter-- Romeo was onstage, enraged by the recent death of his friend Mercutio, and was rushing his evil cousin Tybalt with drawn sword when the two slayers broke through the curtain. Romeo's pasteboard sword glanced off of Alek's shoulder and bent like a rabbit ear as he and Sean broke between them and cut a jagged, crazed line toward the stage ap.r.o.n proper. Tybalt swore, his face crumpling in angst at their blatant upstaging, and tried to take ahold of Sean's arm and drag him off the stage.

It was Tybalt's mistake. Laughing still, grinning all the while, Sean dragged his sword back over his right shoulder, cleared Tybalt's head from his shoulders like a man knocking an apple off a barrel. Blood gushed. "Oops," giggled Sean, "dropped something, man."

Alek hissed like a cat, like the blood loosened from the stump of the man's neck. "Ba.s.sstard..."

Sean grinned at him with surprise, shook off the headless body clinging to him, kicked it into the orchestra pit, sending down a rain of blood like anointment on the heads of those in the first two rows. "Like you ain't?" He chopped at Alek with the murderous sword.

Alek recoiled, skating the blood and the metal cables of the stage, jumping nimbly away from the silver whistle of death falling across his throat. Sean's second slice caught Romeo at the side of his head as the actor was turning to run, shaving away a portion of his cheek it a flap and exposing his molars on the left side. Romeo screamed out of his mouth and out of the side of his face.

Blood painted Alek's face like makeup, blinded him: Tybalt's, Romeo's, his own. The floorboards under his feet were iced with split blood. He stumbled out of the path of Sean's downward a.s.sault, sensed the floor skating out from under him. He went down, the back of his skull cracking against the iron stand of a strobe light.

Darkness poured in, but the house was white with silence, and through it all Alek felt the crashing peal of laughter and the whicker of a quick overhand strike, a finishing strike, the coup de grace-- Faster than the human eye could see or follow it, almost faster than he could, he took the strobe's stem in his hands and blindly wrenched it forward like a shield. Steel glanced off iron and made the strobe sing in Alek's hands, sent the vibration and the heat of the poisonous metal shooting through his hands and all the way down to his elbows. He threw the strobe stiffly away, his hands burning cold. Above, somewhere amidst all the darkness, Sean was howling like a wounded animal. Alek tossed his bead, shook away the remaining darkness, and saw-- The Stone Man was on his knees at the end of the stage, the sword forgotten, his hands sheltering the portion of his face which had suffered the sword's ricochet. His bottom lip had been shaved off, his nose neatly spinxed. Sean tossed back his head of blood-washed blonde hair and screeched deafeningly like some d.a.m.ned beast out of the Abyss. The clamsh.e.l.l lights r.i.m.m.i.n.g the ap.r.o.n crackled and spat in winks of bursting blue light and pungent ozone, then went dark. Cables came alive and twisted like tentacles around the props. The backdrop split and fell away like flesh from its border of studs. With a final little cry Sean tipped sideways over the edge of the orchestra pit and was gone.

Shaking as if with palsy, numb beyond pain, almost beyond terror, Alek dragged himself up in the midst of the blood and the carnage, the war and the strange silence. He squinted out at the audience through the smoky violet lighting and weaved with confusion and disbelief when the audience begun, slowly, to applaud.

The sound redoubled his shuddering like a leaf in a tempest. Idiots. Did they think this was a performance?

Part of the f.u.c.king play? Something flambant neuf? He felt sick. Sick to death. Sick almost to the point of pa.s.sing out.

From behind him came the rusted bells of saneless laughter.

He turned around, slowly, dreading this now, dreading it...

Slowly the Stone Man emerged from the pit, a horrorshow of scored tissue and awry b.l.o.o.d.y hair. The remnants of his nose hung like beaten meat from his face. His left eye was gone, the socket swollen with a yellow fluid as thick as curdled cream. Still he grinned, slinking up onto the stage like a serpent from out of its warren. "They love me, jelly bean," he garbled. "I was born for the stage...and my face"--he touched the ruined red soup of his face--"my face is my fortune!" He screamed laughter.

It was too much; Alek backed away toward the end of the stage. Mad. Sean was mad. The Coven was mad.

Maybe their whole f.u.c.king race was mad.

"Don't go, jelly bean!" Sean cried as he climbed to his feet on the stage, weaved as he turned to face the appreciative audience and the falling flowers, and swe pt downward in an elaborate bow which liber ated the fragment of his nose from the rest of his face. "They haven't seen our encore yet!"

Encore. It took Alek a moment to realize what Sean meant. The audience had risen in an ovation, most of them punks and goths and straights with weird taste in theatre to be sure, but among them only two figures were moving. Moving toward the stage. Quickly-- Aristotle. Robot...

Alek ran. Velvet curtains crashed away as he ran, ran from this boogeyman made of steel and bone and blood. Ran from the slayers closing the distance between them. He ran, mindlessly, like an animal sensing death, ran blind, numb to all feeling but one, but terror--hair-raising, bone-cold, all-consuming terror--and there, in the wings, amidst a crushing group of buffeting, baffled performers in elaborate Veronan dress, Alek tripped and sprawled flat on the floor and did not move. It was enough. He was so tired, so d.a.m.ned f.u.c.king tired...

"So full of despair, are you? You said we would always be together. Did you lie, beloved?" came a seductive little voice out of the darkness for him. Through a mosaic of tears he saw red; Debra had come back for him at last. Lie? He had done many, many things, most of them horrible, but he had never lied to her. Never in all his years. He promised to love her forever. He promised. She took him by the hand, and when she tugged at him he rose up as if on invisible wires.

His vision mottled, then cleared. Not Debra. Teresa. Oh not again. He wanted to stop, to shake her and scream into her face. She was cheating. She always cheated and tricked him. But he was flying with her over the floor and through the door and out into the night, and now he remembered why, remembered what waited for him beyond that curtain of terror.

Together they left behind the stoop and the theatre and all the horror, and it was a headlong, pounding rush for the mouth of the alley which let out onto a real world, a world where vendors finagled and pickpockets did their thing, where prices were inflated and money depressed, where the world was being carried down into h.e.l.l on the arms of its political leaders and where there was no place for laughing demi-vampires and mad covens and elusive Chronicles.

The place of the mortal and the alive.

21.

So they were being followed.

And for the first time, probably since ever, Alek realized that were this not New York City, you'd almost think it was ten in the morning instead of ten at night. The sidewalks were full of people, walking from parking lots towards the glamorous lights of Broadway, or making their way toward the bars and restaurants that ran in storefront chains up and down the streets. Among them, all but invisible to their eyes, or to those hungering for what they had to offer, stood those selling illicit wares, illegal substances, s.e.x, maybe arms, putting on their lines, sometimes snagging a respectable-looking pa.s.serby. As he walked these same streets with Teresa, being as casual as his look allowed, it amazed him to realize how many ordinary people burned with unmentionable desires.

I will leave one day, he thought solemnly, I will go away but it will not be me going. I will be somebody else when that fateful day arrives. Because if I went, I would die. And he wondered how many others owned such an obtrusive thought-loop. But there was no way he could stay here if he failed to find the Chronicle, no way at all. And yet he would, winner of failure. Because for all the grime and underlying violence, this was his city. And he had absolutely nowhere to go. d.a.m.ned if you do, d.a.m.ned if you don't.

They waited at the light, staying back in the shadows of a bank building, prepared to make a left on Forty- second Street on their way home. Teresa's home, rather. A block away rose the corner of the high-rise housing Covenant House, its facade lit with flood lamps like a beacon to runaways everywhere. Alek remembered that about a decade earlier it's founder, Father Bruce Ritter, was accused of having s.e.x with several male youths. He resigned amidst scandal and disappeared from the public eye without being prosecuted. And without ever being seen again.

The church took care of its own.

The light changed but he made no move up Forty-second. "They're here," he said and Teresa turned, looking for all the world like any other streetcorner girl. But for her eyes. Her crystal-gleaming, night-piercing eyes. He saw her stiffen and knew she'd seen it as well. The slight rush amidst the crowd, the bit of turmoil as figures waded through, cutting a skirmish line to the front.

G.o.dd.a.m.nit.