"Don't try. You don't want to find our who's better," Alek said and watched the wounding of his words.

"It'd kill me, but I'll cut you down in this war if you intercede. I want him, Book. I want his head."

"He gave you everything, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"What he gave me was corrupt and spoiled."

"This is madness!" Book laughed viciously, turned his back. "Debra's madness."

Alek moistened his cold, cracked lips. They were perched on the ledge of the world now, teetering, ready to fall. And now, with no voice and no argument he was forced to explain to this man what he could not explain to himself.

"He saved you from Debra," Booker growled. "Christ, Alek, he saved you from yourself! Do you know what would have happened to you if he hadn't intervened? Do you have any f.u.c.kin' idea what you'd be today?"

"I wouldn't be a slayer."

"No, you'd just be out there on the streets ripping throats out."

Alek breathed in a mouthful of cold, bitter air. He tasted steel and acid and the coming war. "So he takes us in, so he gluttons us with books and art and music, so what? So f.u.c.king what? It's still there, Book. The madness. You act like some f.u.c.king virgin! You mean you never think about it--killing something? Maybe someone--"

"Course I think 'bout it! We all do, d.a.m.nit. But thinkin' don't make us animals, the doing--that's the problem. But that's why we have the Coven, the slayings."

Alek hurrumpted. "You think killing all those vamps takes it away? You think you'll wake up one morning and it'll just be gone like a virus or somethin'? All the killing used up? I think we're stuck with it forever.

What do you think? You even have an opinion of your own anymore?"

Book let out a raw breath. "I think you're crazy as bat s.h.i.t, Alek."

He felt numb. Nothing could penetrate him now. Nothing at all. His armor was fully-forged. "He killed Debra," he heard himself say in a scorched voice too full of years and sorrow. "It was all his game. He killed her so he could have me all to himself. He even bent the prerogative of the f.u.c.king church to have me. And believe me, there's nothing pure in his intentions, Book, nothing at all."

Booker looked appalled, as if his brother had spoken against G.o.d Himself, uttered the blackest profanity. He shook himself, looked everywhere. "You know what we are and you know what it means. You know what it's like to belong to no one and nothing. The Coven is everything, brother, because it's the only thing." He shook his head. "G.o.dd.a.m.nit, I don't want to watch you die, but I don't want the Coven to die either. And if you kill it, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d, I'll kill you back, I swear to G.o.d I will."

Alek nodded, turned away his face and let the storm buffet his profile to numbness. He watched the limos skim down Fifth Avenue like black sharks on their way to a ma.s.s feeding frenzy. "I suppose then it's going to he different the next time we meet. We won't be brothers anymore."

"Can you accept that?"

"I su ppose I have to." He blinked the snow from his eyes, wiped it from his cheek and throat. "He's killed, Book, you know. The innocent and the guilty. He killed Akisha. That wasn't sanctioned. It wasn't even necessary.

Sean's a killer too."

"Casualties of our war, Alek Knight,"

He felt cold. "I just wanted you to know."

"I know." Book laughed again in utter despair and drew his sword. A bone-handled tachi, it reached an easy forty-six inches. He turned and set it against his brother's collarbone. It gleamed there like the dirty white ice at his feet, utterly real. Cold.

"You'll be celebrated a thousand years," Alek said, watching Book's eyes and not the sword. "They'll put your face in the Abbey. h.e.l.l, they'll probably make you Covenmaster." He felt nothing. "Is that what you want?"

Book's lips quivered back in a silent snarl. He looked ready to spit venom like the legendary Lilith who had created them out of Adam's wayward seed. But instead of striking, either in weapon or word, he dropped the sword to the snow and started down the remainder of the steps.

Alek picked it up. "Book?"

Book turned around. The snow melted and ran away from his feet in a widening pool like stop motion photography or some sort of special affect. Slowly it rivered down the stairs of the Metro. Bubbled. Boiled.

"I don't need a sword to do you. Remember that."

Alek said nothing, did nothing. Only nodded.

"Take it," Book said. "Maybe it'll save you. Maybe not." His expression fell from anger to utter neutrality.

He said everything and nothing at all in one long tragic glance. I love you. I hate you. Go to f.u.c.king h.e.l.l, you d.a.m.n traitor-- "How did you know to find me here?" Alek finally said, anything to break the silence and the cold and the unnatural heat weighing in on them both.

Book looked back. "You suck as a skater, white boy."

Alek shook his head with puzzlement. "What?"

"Just an educated guess, is all."

"You going to tell him I'm here, Book?"

"What do you think, brother?" be answered. Then he turned away, and on the ledge of the world Alek watched him walk away, shrink into a featureless twigman down on Fifth Avenue, a bit of darkness against the pale foot of the Metro.

"d.a.m.n you, Book." Alek snuffled, breathing in the white claustrophobic air and the bitter snow and cold and the deep heart of midnight. He waited for at least a single tear to fall, but it was stubborn in the end. And after a few moments he gave up and started back up the stairs.

23 He rapped three times hard on the director's door of the Wallace Wing. A minute pa.s.sed and he rapped again, harder this time.

"Come."

He pushed the door open on Charles's rectory. This wasn't the first time he had been here. A real overworked packrat, Braxton's suite resembled the home-away-from- home that became the fate of so many New Yorker workers' office s.p.a.ces. Except that here fossils and Greek amphorae and modern appliances shouldered each other for room on the wall-climbing shelves. Beside the door crouched one of Charles's personal affectations--a taxidermized upstate ten-point buck with black gla.s.s alien eyes. Hunting was about the only sport that Charles took in, if you didn't count railing on his poor employees half the time and firing them the other half.

As brutal as he sometimes was, Alek had to admit that Braxton was a fair employer in a city that didn't seem to know what fair play was anymore. Alek glanced away from the deer, remembering those occasional tirades in Color Deluxe, how it had taken just about every once of his patience to keep from quitting his job as an usher in the museum.

But he supposed it was the art that had kept him going. The possibility that maybe one day--maybe one day soon--Charles Braxton would really look at his work and give him a grant. A show. A real show like the masters were apt to get. Well, he'd had it, hadn't he? And where had his dreams brought him? The most important day of his life also turned out to be the last normal one. He looked at the oil painting hanging on the far wall of Charles's office--a woman with chains upon her face and her arm upraised to an encroaching storm--and wondered who had hung it there, Charles or Tahlia.

"I like your work," Tahlia said. She was standing off to one side near the oil, a gla.s.s of wine in her hand. Her husband was nowhere to be found. She lowered her gaze, looked up at him piously from beneath her feathery lashes as if he was some interesting painting or sculpture to be appraised and categorized. Alek felt a curious mixture of relief and grat.i.tude, as if the matter of his talent might end there. But Tahlia had other plans. From the tone of her voice he was almost certain that she was merely being polite. "But I think you are greedy. You play at feelings, yes, but you also hide behind them."

Her bizarre critiquing of his work caught him off-guard. His head jerked up and he almost completely forgot his reason for being here.

"What...do you mean?"

"Art is suffering. Every great artist suffers. It is the human condition that makes him suffer--loss, sorrow, the futility of love, the fears of mortality. You have painted loss. But the loss you paint is a sham and of little consequence. You paint darkness, but it is the darkness you imagine men feel, the darkness you believe waits for them at the end of their lives. It is not your darkness. The only work which almost touches your brilliance is this one. You are greedy and you keep the darkness and the loss and, ultimately, the beauty, to yourself.

You keep it within, afraid to expose it to the sun. And because of that greed, because of that petty need to hide your beauty, you will never be great."

She spoke quietly, earnestly, without condescending him, and Alek knew in his heart that she was right. He also knew that she had studied his work, all of it, for this painting on Braxton's wall he considered his best.

He had poured everything he had at the time into the image. But there was also the uneasy feeling that somehow or other he had traded on misfortune to create it, like a fascinated bystander at the scene of a gruesome car accident.

Tahlia shrugged noncommittally. Again as if his fears and agenda were plain for her to see. "An artist is a vampire, did you know? He drinks the pain and sorrow out of the wounds of others and turns that pain and sorrow into immortality. And when you do that you raise a monument to his or her memory. You make your sufferers immortal."

Under a wall armory of shields and crosswords and weapons of the Crusades, Teresa sat up on Charles's leather smoking couch. Alek hadn't noticed her there until just now, as she came alive like some great porcelain artist's doll. She seemed about ready to say something, then changed her mind and put her hands in her lap.

"You have," he said, watching Teresa, "an unusual perspective, Mrs. B--Tahlia."

"Perhaps I am more like you than unlike you. Even for our obvious differences."

Alek hesitated, the fear of being bated somehow hovering near. "I'm not sure I understand what you mean," he said at last.

"You choose to be evasive." She nodded, put her hand over a yellowish skull on Charles's desk weighing invoices; it was a great feline skull, extinct, with saber teeth, but she touched it like a pet she had once loved.

"We could play that game, yes. But I rather doubt you have much time left. The Coven is closing in on you.

Wine?" She offered him a gla.s.s.

His head spun. For a moment, yet again, he almost felt as if Akisha were again with him, motherly and protective, yet a brutal predator to him as well. He took the gla.s.s, set it aside, atop a text book. "Who are you?'

"Tahlia Frencesca Braxton," she answered simply.

"No--who are you? How do you know Byron? And the Coven? What do you know about that?"

She smiled. Demure. She drank her wine. "You seek the Chronicle. Paris's Chronicle. Am I right?"

Alek said, "How can you...?" He looked to Teresa; together, they looked at Tahlia. Tahlia nodded and sucked back on her smoke with careful pa.s.sion. Then she crushed it out and halved her eyes like some wily cat. "Oh, this is before your time, dear. I was a regular wet-nose myself when I knew Byron. A debutante, if such a thing still existed in the forties. Long time ago, back when the dinosaurs ruled the earth."

She tipped her head, again catlike. A secretive woman, but full of secrets she could no longer hide. Or chose not to. "Of course you won't find anything in those artsy books on Byron. He was a cartographer in the French army, did you know? He also raided tombs in Egypt and pyramids in South America. Later on, he played the tragic eccentric painter, all right, but within reason. You see, Byron didn't care at all about upping his piece value if it meant drawing every slayer down out of his hole like flies to a carca.s.s."

Alek felt frozen to the floor with fascination.

Tahlia smiled her wide, toothy, movie-star smile. Suddenly she became the White Bird again, the cat no longer. "His exhibits were on loan here and Byron came following after--what folks today call a tour, I guess.

Only they called it abroad then. Anyway, Byron told me everything about Paris and the Coven--about the coward who calls himself Amadeus. Byron used to wander the galleries after closing, sit and study the frescoes. And could Byron talk. Said he remembered the Bastille, the Occupation. Napoleon, Hitler--they were all the same to him. When you were as old as he was it all starts running together, he said. Only art bookmarks time. He pointed to a hundred different pieces he'd done under a hundred different names. He used to laugh he'd died a thousand deaths a poor, proud painter."

Tahlia nodded to herself. "And me...well, I guess I was his Renfield. At first. At least until the night he started showing me the basics of watercolor in his Village loft and finished up showing me other things." She fell to a meditative silence and watched the floor, her eyes alight with memories, some sweet, some so sad they were a palpable emotion between the two of them, like the fragrance of a woman's skin, the brush of silk.

Alek closed his eyes, then opened them again. He wandered closer to the woman, examining her mature but in no way unbeautiful face. The lines there were not imperceptible, but instead of aging her as they should have, they gave her only a mysterious character. She was like one of his own, but not. She was mortal.

Wasn't she? "You can't be in your seventies. It's not possible."

"Seventy-six," she said, reaching for a sip of wine. "The blood of his kind...it acts rather like an elixir on human tissue, did you know?" She smiled, but now somehow infinitely sadly, as if she'd been asked to speak of the dead. She sat down at her husband's desk and took the stem of her cigarette from her upturned mouth and rested it lightly at her temple. Her hand grew utterly still over the cat skull. Still now, she was like a famous oil saying much by saying nothing at all. Then the portrait came alive. The portrait said, "We both expected him to bury me. We never expected we would have only thirteen years out of an eternity. Thirteen years..."

Teresa had risen from the couch, And now she went to the woman and knelt at Tahlia's feet and took her hand from off the cat skull and held it prayerfully between both of her own. Was this possible now, this icon? Predator subservient to prey? But it was. It was.

"Love is dangerous," she said. "I am sorry for your loss, but all of us here have lost someone."

Tahlia's eyes narrowed and she set aside her smoke and sealed the icon with her second mortal hand. "I married Charlie--I don't know, I suppose I thought it would help me find the answers I needed. The names of the people involved in Byron's disappearance. Charlie knows so much of this town...but nothing ever came of it." Her face darkened. She said, after blowing out a breath, "Byron was not a man you would have liked to know, sister. Too old. Full of bitter drink. And I fear some of it has rubbed off on me."

"I know the one you seek, caro," Teresa whispered, her black lashes skating her white cheek as she dropped her eyes.

"I'd heard a name once, a woman, Deb--"

"Amadeus."

It was enough to slay her speech. She looked ready to protest, but Teresa chose to gift her with her attention again and something in Teresa's eyes stopped her. The truth.

"Debra--was Byron's lover for a time, but never his slayer," Teresa said.

Tahlia hesitated a moment. Then she nodded, numb perhaps straight to the bone. Alek could in fact feel the shock pouring off of her in freezing-hot waves. It was like an epiphany. It was like death. Or a bizarre rebirth. He couldn't imagine it--to spend practically your entire life in the revenge business, chasing a woman down who was already dead.

Unspent tears gleamed in Tahlia's eyes. She glanced querulously around the room as if searching for something or seeking an escape. "I am sorry. I'm a foolish old woman. And a bad hostess. If there's anything I can get you--?"

"There is." Alek withdrew the handmade map and spread it out on the desk in front of her.

Tahlia looked it over for a moment. Then she looked up.

"It's Byron's work, Tahlia."

"I know. You do wonderful reproductions," she said.

He took a deep breath, wondering how to phrase this correctly. "Then maybe you know why I'm here."

"You're here for the Chronicle," she said, and Alek felt his heat skip. "Byron told me. He said he had it, that someone would come for it. But no one ever did." Her husky smoker's voice faded to a whisper. Then nothing. "Debra," she said the name, finally. "Who was she?"

"Just another victim." Alek looked aside. His voice, when it came haltingly a few moment's later, sounded to himself like a lone wind through a tunnel of rocks. "Tahlia...Do you have it, still? The Chronicle? Did Byron give it to you?"

She will say no. For a moment he was absolutely sure. She will say no, that Byron died before he ever gave it to her. She will say no, sorry kids, he didn't, and that will be that.

"Yes."

Alek started like a man kicked. His heart fluttered. "You have it? You really do?" He was leaning all the way over the desk, practically in Tahlia's face, so close he could smell the human commingling of sweat and tobacco smoke and musky perfume on her. And he did not care.

Tahlia hesitated herself, but only a moment. "I have a box, a fireproofed box. He gave it to me." She mimed its size, about a foot in breadth, twice that in length.

Oh yes! Yes, yes, yes!

She got up from her seat. "It's in Charlie's wall safe. I put it there. I don't know why." She moved robotically to the Manet on the wall opposite his fresco and opened it, spun a combination lock, and the door clicked silently open. She dug for a minute or two. The box had been there a long time obviously and had found its way to the far back. But after a few heartpounding moments she turned around with the fireproofed box in both hands.

It was one of those dark green late-sixties models, the kind used by the military before they became a mainstay in the American public. Old, but built to last a long time. Decades. Maybe centuries.

It fell heavy as a brick upon Braxton's desk.

Tahlia said, "I told Charlie it was my mother's pearls. I didn't want him to open it and know. I still don't."

She looked up at him. Not imploringly, but with comradeship.

"Your secret dies with me," he said. "I swear it."

Teresa's hand fell over the box. She pet it forlornly, like some great treasure. A treasure, yes. Great? Yes, yes! They had done it. Done what they must. And now Alek felt such relief and long-stayed fatigue he wondered it he wouldn't simply fall to the floor in a faint. He didn't know what they would find when they opened that box, did not know if it would really be enough to save him, but here at least was dated, living proof of what the Vatican had planned for Alek's people, proof that the Coven was a useless mental fixation, a Judas goat that would one day very soon lead all the others to slaughter.

He looked again at the keyless box, the way Teresa moved her fingers around the locked-tight edges. She grunted, and then there was a snap of metal. She flipped the top back.