The light had turned to red again, and now the slayers emerged fully to the fore of the waiting crowd. Two of them. The one was pet.i.te, male, with a sly, bespeckled, foxlike face and nancy-boy features. Aristotle. The other, Robot, also male, would have been as nondescript as a balding, middle-aged banker in shades and coat were it not for his sheer size. The man stood half a foot taller than Alek's six feet. had biceps as big around as Alek's thigh and outweighed him by more than sixty pounds. His black wool coat, as it were, looked ready to split at the seams from the sheer muscled bulk and hidden hardware the man carried. Both Aristotle and Robot turned to look on him at the same moment. Robot's expression was unreadable, as always. Totty smiled ever so slightly with only his eyes and moved aside to accommodate the third member of their little unholy trinity.

Stone Man.

He must have changed his b.l.o.o.d.y coat, raped some poor fool of blood to accelerate his mending, because besides looking a little disheveled and more than a little miffed, he looked pretty much like any other blade- thin, strung-out teenaged speed freak or runaway. He stood indolently, both arms loose and slightly spread.

He was naked of weapons. Nothing threatening about the sight of him except his posture--shoulders slightly hunched, chin pointing at the ground, eyes up and showing all whites at the bottom. Typical vulture stance, just before the creature leaps from a tree limb and eats the eyes out of a dying desert animal. His little army surrounded him, providing the stage set for what Alek hoped would be some ill-conceived power play, a few obscenities thrown, maybe a boyish tantrum before departure back to the Covenhouse, the memories of Kansas and Takara's untimely demise still rolling around their fearful little brains. Then again, Kansas and Takara had taken their frustration out on the whole of the subway, so maybe there was going to be more.

Maybe there was going to be fireworks. Or a nuclear bomb.

Alek felt snakes twist in his stomach the moment he spotted Aristotle reaching into his coat. "Down!" he almost barked, then felt a wash of relief that he had hesitated as Totty withdrew a box of Camels and pulled one out with his teeth. He waggled his eyebrows at Alek like Groucho Marx making a joke. Robey did not reach for the iron throwing knives that lined the insides of both sides of his coat. Sean did not move at all, as if waiting for some cue. Cold carrion comfort. So they were here to bring him back alive--or at least intact.

That didn't mean they weren't going to have their fun first. Oh the joy of the hunt, Alek thought as he and Teresa began to casually shove through the crowd, working fast but not so fast they would attract a cop's attention. No one ran in New York unless they had a purse under their coat.

Walking medium-fast, breathing cold through his teeth, Alek's mind and inner sight jumped to a pa.s.sing pedestrian heading in the opposite direction. Sure enough, he saw, Sean and his soldiers were on the move now.

"Don't look back," he whispered as they turned up Forty-second Street, past a city-subsidized apartment building and a corner store selling baseball caps and T-shirts. The hair on the back of Alek's neck tried to crawl down his back. They were walk-running now as fast as pedestrian traffic allowed, trying not to look like targets. Trying not to look suspicious.

Again his mind jumped, this time to a street musician in a doorway across the street.

Sean was not running. He and his soldiers were walking with predatory grace to the center of the street, en ma.s.se. He was laughing, a low rumble more felt than heard, like the prologue to an earthquake that could decimate an entire city block.

Limos and taxis shot past Alek in the slushy curb on their immediate left, their gla.s.s shivering. He saw his eyes in the trembling pa.s.sing gla.s.s, his young, frightened eyes. Saw them squelch as something like a m.u.f.fled explosion seemed to build in the ca.n.a.ls of his ears. They were all too far past the musician for his piggybacking to be of any more service. Again the rumble like the street or something beneath it were awakening. He spun around.

A fire hydrant exploded as Sean crossed its path, spitting out a bloodlike gush of furious white water that soaked the street and the traffic and four dozen pedestrians before they managed to escape its wrath. Sean laughed. And still he walked, the acoustic rumble following him like a peculiar second retinue. Behind him, a sawhorse in the curb slanted sideways as the tarmac heaved and made a manhole cover quake and dance like a gigantic fallen quarter. More laughter, amped-up like an electric guitar ringing on a high, screechy A note; it made the street crack and smoke with his steps as if he were some h.e.l.lsp.a.w.n spat up upon the earth to set waste to it.

The ground buckled under Alek's feet, the walk sliding upward like a tombstone shoving itself upward through the earth. Alek grabbed a lamp post for security, slid around sideways off the rearing concrete and set himself down beside Teresa in the street. She worried her bottom lips, her eyes fixed behind them.

"What is it?"

"Psi..." He lost his train of thought at the sound of a rampaging car horn. A taxi headed for them, the cabby leaning on the horn. Alek grabbed Teresa by the arm and pulled them both out of its path. It roared by, all hot rolling exhaust and flying paper. Sean grinned as the cab headed dead-on for him and swept his arm outward as if to swat a fly. The airquake that followed immediately shimmered like deadpan heat. Brakes squealed and an apocalypse of white light flickered off the windshield of the cab, briefly illuminating the cabby's rictus of mortal, uncomprehending fear. Then the cab was off the road, was up on the walk, past it and through a stand of meters, the nose ramming like a bullet into the picture window of a lighted 24-hour Korean deli. The vehicle slammed to a crunching stop, half-in, half-out the face of the building, teetering, the horn blaring incessantly like a siren with no shut-off.

All bets were off this time. Pedestrians scattered like ants, which was the only advantage of an otherwise awful situation. Teresa hovered in the street a moment, taking it all in, then chose the largest group of panicked escaping pedestrians to join. Alek followed wordlessly. They were thinking alike. The longer they kept to the tatters of the crowd, he thought, the harder they would be to follow. Unless, of course, Amadeus, that b.a.s.t.a.r.d, were tracking him by blood and feeding his slayers the information. If that were true, then they were truly doomed and there was nowhere they could hide for long.

He saw shadows flickering from the corners of his eyes and he decided he didn't want to contemplate that possibility. Maybe, he thought, by staying with a larger, more mobile crowd, there would be fewer casualties this time. Even the trinity of evil on their heels could not possibly kill every citizen they encountered without the police and maybe a full SWAT team first stopping them. Could they?

"Stay with me," Teresa said and took him by the hand.

They reached Port Authority and Alek felt his heart start to sink as the lights and the noise inside the station hit him like a fist to the midsection, staggering him back half a step. I don't want to go in there. I don't.

Death there. He leaned against a wall to steady himself. Teresa pulled him by the arm. "They're coming, caro."

A security guard from across the concourse looked up from a newsstand and eyed the panicked crowd curiously.

Alek took a deep breath. There were crowds of people rushing back and forth, seeming to loom towards him and then just as quickly receding. Above echoed the huge vaulted ceiling and all around them came the relentless light reflecting off the white floors and walls like ice reflecting the heat of the sun; light poured from ticket counters and shop windows and fast-food restaurants and departure gates. Too much. He felt sick and dizzy. He glanced around for an escape route and saw they were directly across the street from the Church of the Holy Cross, its orange brickwork making it look more like a factory than a church. He grabbed Teresa by the sleeve and looked toward the church sitting there like something in disguise, something afraid to admit to what it was.

He felt Teresa's muscles stiffen in response when an explosion and the acrid stench of a broken gas main down on Forty-second reached their senses. The air felt charged around them. Hot. A summer night with the air stifling and furlike and full of the threat of lightning. Sirens seemed to fill the night up with panic. He saw the shine of them in her eyes. "Will they follow?" she asked, eyes flicking to the cop who had dropped his copy of Veranda and was heading out in the direction of the commotion.

He glanced down the street at the smoke and the chaos that arched like a living wall between them and the enemy. "Pray to G.o.d they don't," he answered her.

Seconds later they stopped at the wooden double doors of the church and looked up at the stone visage of a saint on his plinth standing outside like a sentinel. Alek didn't know his name, but the face of the divine mortal was somewhat familiar, pale and broody and vaguely carnivorous. He tried the door of the church, praying it was open, the back of his neck hackling with the sounds of the encroaching heat and violence, and found to his utmost surprise that this time his prayers were answered.

It was the first time as a grown man that he was inside a church and he did not know what to expect, if the ground would quake, if G.o.d would strike them both down when they probably had no souls. The collective power of the votive candles was like a solar flare as they stepped inside, and for a moment he was afraid G.o.d was striking them both down as h.e.l.lsp.a.w.n fool enough to enter His sacred dwelling place. But lightning did not strike and the ground did not open up. They were alive.

He let out a sigh of relief, then reminded himself that most of the legends about his people were wrong anyway. Garlic, wooden stakes, silver--these things did s.h.i.t against vampires, so why would a church be any different?

He squinted against a ma.s.sive, shifting, reddish darkness that made him feel as if he were wading through a great watery womb. He saw terrible stained-gla.s.s images of violence and stations of the cross crowding the walls like the markings of some alternative Coven. There were dark wooden pews, but no table. The ornate raised altar was of wood and stone and bra.s.s and nothing had died for its construction. He detected incense, as in the Abbey, and beeswax, but also the cloy of human warmth and sweat.

They were alone, or nearly so. A drunk lay asleep on a back pew, and somewhere far above in the choir loft someone tapped inexpertly at an organ. They seemed oblivious to the horrors going on outside the doors. Or used to it. Alek shivered.

And then there was the young priest. He turned away from the tiers of candles he was lighting to remove his chasuble and watch as Alek and Teresa walked down the aisle to the altar front. He was a handsome man with coal-black Latino hair and eyes to match, a square, honest chin darkened by the shadow of a strong beard, his lips tight and stern but oddly devoid of the sour ecclesiastical sneer Alek had seen on the faces of priests and slayers that came with decades of denying the flesh. And if their overall appearance or the blood on their clothing frightened him, the priest did not show it. Perhaps he'd seen worse. Perhaps he'd stood at the mouth of h.e.l.l itself.

Alek stopped toe to toe with the priest and looked into his dark brown eyes. The priest tilted his head and blinked questioningly. For some reason, a surge of shivering guilt rode Alek's flesh to the bone. Vampires believe no more in heaven or h.e.l.l than mortal man. No angels or devils make themselves apparent to us, no matter what the paperback lies say. His lips moved but for a moment he could find no words to speak. He felt like a little boy at the bench of a G.o.d. He felt as if he stood in the doorway of the Abyssus once more, watching its dead lord lap blood from his little stone altar.

And then the words came, unbidden, in a torrent of dry sobs. "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned," he said.

"I've killed...so many. So G.o.dd.a.m.n many. I've put the dead in their grave, and the living too--I've--help me- -" The words beat at his brain, made his head swim. The room rushed in, turned red, then black. A roar filled his ears and the floor fell away and he found himself, once more, a prisoner of the dark.

He dreamt of the web, silken and tearing and bleeding under his scrabbling hands; he dreamt of falling, free- falling, and an open abyss with no bottom and no light rushing up around him like the pit of an open grave; he dreamt these things and he bolted upright, chest heaving and stuttering on a sob, fists balled tight. He glanced around the s.p.a.ce he had awakened within, a small unfinished room, its walls of bare cinder block lined with makeshift bookshelves crammed with pamphlets, newspapers, magazines and books. He saw a big, squatting, ancient desk and on the edge of that desk, a man.

"Don't be alarmed," the young Latino priest said, rising and bringing him a steaming mug of coffee. "Teresa has been telling me much." He nodded toward her where she sat in one of the guest chairs, her jacket off, her hair disheveled, beautiful and gleaming mahogany-black from the red neon lights of the Port Authority spilling in from across the street. The concrete walls offered little insulation from the weather outside, and there was a distinct chill in the room, yet her scarified skin, the belly rings she had, and the serpentlike tattoos that encircled her waist, were exposed to that chill, and she shivered not at all. It was also blatantly apparent to the priest's eyes, yet he treated the sight of her no different than when they had first arrived. Again as if he'd seen all this before and much worse.

Alek took the mug from the man, swung his legs to the side of a green battered leather lounge sofa he was lying on. Coffee. G.o.d but how long had it been since he'd had a steaming cup of caffeine? Too long. He gulped it and burned his mouth, feeling foolish, relieved, exhausted. Finally, he set it aside and looked at the one barred little bas.e.m.e.nt window that showed little more than pa.s.sing feet. But he could hear it.

Sirens. The crackle of police ban.

Somewhere, the city was burning.

He looked away, back at Teresa, as something nagged his mind like an important memory. He looked at her again, more closely. Suddenly he found he didn't remember the piercings, the tattoos. Her hair--it wasn't black at all but that shining, almost-auburn mahogany he had first taken as neon on black. He squinted but couldn't make immediate sense of what he was seeing, or not seeing. It was as if a veil were being lifted away from his eyes.

Or an illusion.

"I'm sorry," was all he could say to her, to them. "I guess I pa.s.sed out."

The priest nodded. He had changed into something a little less ceremonial, a black shirt tucked into a pair of tight black Levis. The black suited him well. There was a strong aura of animal energy that radiated from him. The priest glanced over at Teresa, then back again. After a moment, Alek found he had automatically stiffened in response to the gesture. The man had helped him, probably carried him here, saved his G.o.dd.a.m.n life even, and yet he felt defensive, even territorial, in his presence.

"I understand," the priest said. He smiled a little, knowingly. "You've had a hard night. Teresa told me."

Again Teresa told me. "How much did she tell you?" Alek asked, sending her a sidelong what-the-h.e.l.l-did- you-do? glance. Yet she seemed nonplussed by his suspicions. She was studying the priest, not him. The G.o.dd.a.m.n priest.

The priest seemed oddly elated by the question. He pressed the palms of his hands together in a casual, almost genteel, gesture. "Things," he said with a self-affacing shrug, "that I rather suspected all along."

Alek reached for the mug, held onto its warmth. "What...things, exactly?"

The priest reached for his own mug on the desk, held it and looked on Alek with enormous wisdom. Too much wisdom. What the h.e.l.l was going on? "The history of the Church is long and varied. There is little that has not been recorded. Little in heaven and earth that has not yet occurred. As Ecclesiastes says, there is nothing new under the sun and all that."

Alek drank another mouthful of coffee. He didn't really like where this was going, but it seemed that Teresa had already brought them here. Setting the mug on the floor, he put his hands in his lap, absently brushing the inside of his coat. No sword. He remembered. And felt naked, hopeless. "I'm afraid our story has more to do with h.e.l.l, Father, than heaven and earth."

The priest did not flinch, did not blink. "Why don't you tell me about it," he invited.

Alek studied his hands in his lap, the depths of the black coffee in the cup on the floor at his feet. A fragment of the dream, of falling, came to him, then disappeared.

The priest waited; his eyes and his posture spoke of interest and suspicion, but no fear. Invitation. But no judgment. He opened his mouth, then closed it. Again a wave of discomfort washed over him, a guarded feeling like being stalked in an alley when the shadows weren't working to your advantage. He shook his head no. They said confession was good for the soul, but that was a human cliche. Vampires had no souls, or if they did, it was comp osed of a vastly different substance. Confession would do him no good.

The priest nodded as if understanding these things innately. And then again he spoke, but this time his voice was different, deeper somehow, gruff, the voice of bitter wisdom and age, and he said, "When I was eight years old I drank the blood of my infant sister. That was in 1746. That is my confession."

Alek swayed to his feet. He felt numbed.

"It is my gift, to conceal," continued the priest. "It is the reason the Coven has never darkened the door of this church. Until now."

He didn't know what else to say. "I'll go."

"Don't." The priest frowned, and Alek saw it then, the endlessly weary creature hiding inside a habit and a human's skin. He reached out with one hand and made contact.

Some object, cold and heavy, was pressed into Alek's palm. A key. "To this room," said the priest. He nodded at the angel-faced little prost.i.tute sitting and watching them both with her great dark eyes. Eyes that looked less than brown now. Softer. Greyer. Like kitten fur.

He wondered if he was losing his mind.

"You'll be safe here; the Coven will not find you this night," the priest said. "I promise."

Alek tore his eyes away from Teresa's face. A headache was banging against the inside of his skull as if it were a kickdrum. "Then--thank you."

"Do not thank me," said the priest without a smile. He stood up. "Only promise me that if you find it, the Chronicle I mean, that you will use it for some good."

Alek held the stern even gaze of the ancient young man and nodded his head once like a vow taken.

The priest smiled and took his cup and carried it to the door of the office. He started pulling it closed behind him, but Alek said, "Wait."

He tilted his head. Catlike. "Yes?"

"Why help me," he said, "if you hate the Coven so much?"

The priest chuckled, a genuine sound. "We all deserve a little redemption once in a while. Don't you agree?"

The door clicked shut. He heard the click of the inside lock. He turned around.

"You've tricked me all along," he said as the last of the glamour softened and then disappeared off her figure like a dream breaking up, and he was left staring at this heartstopping beauty with her auburn long hair and sea-green eyes and tinkling, shining piercings.

"No," she answered him. "You did."

22.

The slayer stood at the frozen midwinter's window and touched the immortal dolphins in their static flight, the twilight somber on his face like a mask, the gla.s.s cold as a bone under his fingertips. His breath plumed in the semidark with his sigh. Booker closed his eyes and heard the harsh, whispered echoes of precocious thirteen-year-old children, chosen brothers, at war with one another: You can't go, you can't!

I can't stay, Book, not now.

Has he given you the Rite of Blood?

What kind of question is that?

Answer it.

That's none of your f.u.c.king business!

Silence.

Then: You never told me.

Book opened his eyes and tore open his tie knot. Hot as all h.e.l.l in here, he thought, watching the steam of his exhalation frost the window pane opaque. He started drawing a little dagger on the pane, was molding the hilt into a form of a dolphin when he finally noticed the hem of his London Fog was smoking.

"f.u.c.king s.h.i.t!" he hissed and beat the blackening material out, feeling like the biggest d.a.m.n fool on the planet for letting the psi get away from him. G.o.dd.a.m.n walking Zippo, that's what he was. No f.u.c.king discipline...

He almost laughed at that. He was the one always going on about discipline like some f.u.c.king wise-a.s.s Shao- Lin monk, giving Alek all those pained looks about his drinking problem. f.u.c.king hypocrite. Yeah, that's what he was.

Flame-free, he checked the time. After five. Sundown. s.h.i.t. Somewhere out there in the city Alek was running free or getting ready to. Alek, a rogue. G.o.d, but that was a shiver. Debra had been a rogue. Heather MacNeil with her frequent bouts of lunacy had been a rogue. Not Alek. Alek wasn't mad.

Just headstrong.

Just a fool, he thought, rubbing at his p.r.i.c.kly arms. He undid the garroting tie at his throat farther, then took if off completely, afraid it might catch. What had the f.u.c.king fool done? The Father had given them so much, a home, a brotherhood.

Book knew how it was. In 1958 the Father had stolen Book away from a group of white-jacketed Dr. Jekyll- types who sat him in a room all day and made him set playing cards on fire. He'd been alone back then, the memory of his mother and his little brother Tyrone's scorched bones lying mixed in the debris of their Eastside project still fresh in his mind. No father had ever claimed him, and after a few years Book had pretty much figured out why. His life had been an almost perfect carbon-copy of Debra's and Alek's and Eustace's and Sean's and all the other slayers', the same patterns and problems repeated in gently diverse ways.

But the Father had taken them away from all that. The Father had given them education and a purpose.

Perhaps that purpose seemed strange and violent at times, perhaps they were asked to do things which frightened them, even appalled them sometimes, but it was a purpose, d.a.m.nit to h.e.l.l, and Book knew from hard experience that purpose was what kept you sane in this life, no matter how long it was. He'd seen people, mortal and otherwise, die for less.

Purpose was the glue that kept the ma.s.ses together, his mother once said during the Movement.

Purpose kept you alive, when there wasn't any reason to go on.

The pager in his pocket buzzed him.

He ignored it.

Purpose, he thought.

And what purpose existed behind the kind of insolence and insult Alek was heaping upon the Coven? Book closed his eyes, trying to see through the film of Alek's insane actions, but all he saw these days when he closed his eyes were memories. School. Parties. Slayings. Alek. He saw a big strange old Colonial house, a door swinging open on a cell with this tall, black-haired white Brooklyn-born boy and his sister. A boy with no hope in his eyes. A boy years older than his body. A boy who could have been Book himself. A boy who became his brother, for chrissakes. A boy who believed in their purpose, a boy who sacrificed d.a.m.n near everything for it. Like him. Just like him.

When the device in his pocket persisted after several minutes, a regular five-alarmer this time, he supposed, he took it off and tossed it to the floor. f.u.c.k Doc Sacco, he thought. f.u.c.k them all at St. Vincent's.

He glanced sidelong out the window, the city tinted grey through the hazy blue gla.s.s. He gritted his teeth.

Aberration. That was what Alek was, an aberration, an ungrateful child. There was no purpose to this. It was all mindless pa.s.sion...