Alek leaned in close, saw the inside of the box was encrusted with dust and five decades of debris. And a book. It stank like a library and Alek felt his heart climb another notch up his throat in antic.i.p.ation.

Teresa gathered the Chronicle in her arms, lifted it out of the box, and presented it to him. For a moment he did nothing but stare at it, the swirls of dust on the battered brown leather cover, the mark of Teresa's fingerprints on it. And then he took it, looking up at her with surprise.

Her face was a bitter mask, her eyes stormy. He tried to tell himself that this was a moment of joy and discovery, but already a chill had taken root in his belly like a little worm. The blood slowed in his veins. He hated that look on her face, hated her for having it now.

Then she turned away.

"Is that why he died?" Tahlia whispered, her voice iced with sarcasm as she glanced over at the ma.s.sive tome.

Alek gave in and opened the book. Latin. He read the first words on the first page to himself.

In the beginning G.o.d created the heavens and the earth.

He touched the ancient page, concentrated on the words as if they would change before his very eyes.

In the beginning G.o.d created the heavens and the earth...

In the beginning...

No. That wasn't true. This wasn't real. Because--because he had done all this now, the subway and the Empress, and before, all that, Akisha and Byron's awful work and the swan and he had fought in this war, yes he had, and there were those who had died in the name of this thing, this impossible thing (now, yes, very impossible, yes) but this wasn't the way things were, no, no, not at all. This wasn't the way things were supposed to turn out...

But was it a joke then? A joke with an evil punchline?

In the beginning G.o.d...

There was no Chronicle. Or at least, none here. None in the States. None that Byron had had. Paris...what had he done? Was it still in Rome, then? Did it even exist at all anymore?

Someone put their hand on him. He snarled and retreated from the contact, snarled at them both, through his nose and his bitter, tasteless mouth. He narrowed his eyes, felt the beauty of his own monstrosity seize him, blacken the pits of his eyes. He would be ugly then, ugly like the monster at the and of the story when it sheds the final level of its humanity like a bad skin. Like a snake. Like what he was, under the man. The snake. The beast, The vampire monster that could scare even the most sophisticated and jaded back to their childhood fears. He would be ugly because it was what he was, had always been, would always be.

He scarcely recalled his next move, only the numb ing mash of the canvas in fro nt of h im, his fresco, and the maze of mindless panic within, the slash of human fingernails that were anything but human, the strength that belonged to the beast and only the beast. The sc.r.a.pe and skitter of torn fabric, the flakes of oil paint under his nails. And then the floor itself rose like a mountain of wood planks constructed with the sole purpose of tripping him up. Climbing it he lost faith and fell to his knees. So he gave in and crawled like an infant, like an animal, to the top and made it out of the hot, headachey, overstuffed office, out into the scorching cold where he could be free. Could fly--.

He fell. Sprawled. Broken. Finished. There was white now in his hair and he thought with giddy amazement, I am Amadeus after all. As was foretold, as is preordained, our names, together, writ in the book of the world in our own commingled blood. Why do I care?

The book. The useless book.

Written for Man. For the Chosen of G.o.d.

Not for him and his. Not for his kith.

Not for the vampire. Never that.

Why am I fighting it?

And she found him like that, the little wh.o.r.e, found him weeping with the humor of irony and his forgotten pain. And he looked at her over one shoulder, spitting frozen strands of his hair away, in complete abhorrence of all she was. f.u.c.king wh.o.r.e. That was what she was. All she was. Monster. Medusa who bad bewitched him.

Lilith.

c.u.n.t.

"Caro," she spoke softly, coming toward him, as to the savage or the sick or the dead.

He answered her not at all.

"Beloved--"

He exploded. "Don't say that," he spat. "Don't ever f.u.c.king call me that, you f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h!"

She frowned and reached for him and he cowered, bared his teeth in a treacherous smile like an animal trapped in its warren with no hope of escape. He was cold, cold as death, and it was dark and her face glowed pale and as perfect as the cold Valentine moon overhead, a moon that never left, that would keep him in its lunar spell forever.

But she was not Debra, had never been Debra. Debra was dead. And now, at last, so was he. She loved him, perhaps, but what she loved was dead and loveless. "I never asked for you," he told her with enormous honesty and articulation. "I'm not like you! I'm not like you at all! I hate you, I hate you to death, to h.e.l.l!"

Perhaps she wept or died under his words, but what did it matter? It was his craft to destroy, his obligation.

It was what Amadeus had fashioned him for, his only purpose He was a slayer.

A machine built for only one purpose.

He was an angel, a harbinger of death.

And he wept tears of blood.

24.

His dreams were full of blood and trouble and he woke from them gratefully.

He woke but did not open his eyes.

He woke beneath the weight of a heavy tome.

He woke sensing intuitively that it was their birthday today, his and Debra's. Valentine's Day. The day of their birth, thirteen years ago.

He wondered where Debra was, wished he knew so that he could say to her what he was thinking, so she could share his odd emotions of memory and mourning with her. But she was never around much anymore, rushing here and there with those musicians and biker-types she seemed to favor to his company, lingering only long enough to fight with him or taunt him and call him a slayer--though, in fact, he had not yet even presented a single offering to the golgotha, hadn't even yet experienced his Grand Testing. Still, the word slayer came off her tongue like a freshet of deadly poison profanity.

Slayer. What are you afraid of, slayer? What do you want, slayer?

In the last five years Debra had tried shamelessly to lure him from the arms of the Coven to the world she'd said she'd discovered beyond its walls, a world alien and strange and ugly and full, he knew, of things brief and breakable.

And the other slayers talked.

Debra knew the city hives a little too well. Those of Carfax and others. She knew Akisha, Carfax's chosen mate, a little too well. She had taken him to the club a few times. Akisha had given him looks from across the room, but he usually shuddered and just made for the door. At home, Debra dueled in cruel words with the Father and many others of the Coven. She treated her people like her enemy. She treated the vampires running loose in the city like her f.u.c.king family. She tortured his brother Booker with teasing touches and obscene promises and her sinisterly lashed brown eyes In five years Debra had learned nothing. Become nothing.

And now she was gone. Today. On their birthday.

It was their fight last night, he knew.

"It does exists! Byron says and Byron knows everything about everything!" He had been in his cell cleaning his sword when she started, oiling it with a cloth and making a mirror of the blade. Trying to avoid the coming fight. Debra was poised across the table in her silk camisole, the fabric like a sheer red mist around the new, demanding angles of her body. A body she no doubt used to get Akisha and this Byron character to do whatever she wanted them to. And what tricks did she ask of them? What games did they play in those underground leather bars? He couldn't help but wonder about the black painted walls of the Lower Eastside club called The Abyssus that she so favored. Better to hide bloodstains? he couldn't help but wonder when he was there.

And Byron. What the h.e.l.l kind of name was Byron anyway?

"Alek."

He looked away. This does not concern me.

"Look at me, Alek."

He looked at his sword instead.

"You b.a.s.t.a.r.d," she said, her voice coa.r.s.e now, the roundness of womanhood tainted with the fury of childhood still. "You f.u.c.king b.a.s.t.a.r.d, how could you think those things?"

He looked at her at last, looked her up and down. The way she painted and pierced herself up these days, she reminded him of the dollar wh.o.r.es that hung with the pushers and pimps on the wharfside near the Hudson. How else could he think?

But where he expected a fury of grief and tears and pain at that thought going to her, there was only pity, black and cold. "No, beloved," she whispered, "you may put your most impure thoughts aside, I am not sleeping with Byron or anyone else. Though perhaps I should. How would that make you feel to know I was? How would you feel to know I was selling my body?"

His fingers bit into the hilt of the sword until the blood fled from his cuticles.

"Why don't you look at me anymore? You know my face; you know my body. What are you afraid of, slayer?"

She snaked narrowly across the length of the table that was all that separated them and all that saved him from her. She seized his hands, and by consequence his sword dropped uselessly to the table. "What are you afraid of, little Puritan?" she asked once more and pressed his hands to the cold poreless flesh of her face that was so like the stone skin of some savage G.o.ddess stolen from her sacred garden. "This?"

No. Of course not.

"This?" she asked in a little hiss as she moved his hands to the new perfect fullness of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s under the gauzy material.

Still he did nothing, felt the whole of his being tremble with silent fear.

She smiled with divine wickedness. "How about this?" she hissed and lowered his hands further, down over her belly, down further-- He jerked and stood up away from her, his chair toppling. How he wanted to harm her in that moment, but what could he say that she would believe? What could he call her that she would not laugh off?

She came around the table, stalking him like a predator, and trapped him against the wall of his cell. She put her hands on him, kissed him. He resisted her, and then he did not. It seemed pointless. She kissed his mouth, licked it like a puppy licking the lips of her beloved owner. But not like a puppy would kiss.

He felt something alien surge inside him. Felt it grow and gather like a bad storm. Felt it pull at his insides until they ran.

"Don't you love me anymore, Alek?" she asked in her aching, breathy little girl's voice.

"You're my life," he told her honestly.

She kissed him again, but lightly this time, at only the corners of his mouth. "Then be with me. Believe in me. Believe in Byron. We can leave here tonight and go and have all kinds of adventures." She smiled, dropped her voice conspiratorially. "Byron says he has the Chronicle. He says no one will dare oppose us with it. Come with us, we can have so much fun!"

He touched her rosy, flushed cheek with sadness. "The Chronicle is a story, Debra. A joke. Byron's just leading you on."

Debra hissed and dashed his hands away from her face. "It's real! d.a.m.nit, Alek, the streets whisper the story if you'll only listen. It's not a story! It's all real!" She took a deep breath, composing herself, and said, "The humans will kill us, Alek. Soon. Maybe in the next fifty years or so. And it won't matter then what name we put on ourselves, vampire, slayer, it won't matter! We're marked, do you understand? Marked." He narrowed his eyes at her, at this foolishness she'd nettled from her restless jaunts into the city underground, foolishness she was being fed by underworld lifeforms who went around calling themselves names like Byron. He knew his catechism. He knew the words of the sacred Covenant by heart. "Amadeus says its a myth," he tried to explain. "A story, Debra, contrived by the vamps in their fear of the church.

There is no Chronicle. The Father--"

"d.a.m.n the Father!"

"The Father says--"

"f.u.c.k the Father!"

He let her go. This was useless. It was 1962 and the whole world was mad with ideas, it seemed. War.

Peace. The Summer of Love. More war. Everyone was just f.u.c.king out of their minds. He went, solemn, back to his seat and began to shine his sword once more.

"Slayer," Debra hissed as she dressed herself for the night. "Go on and draw the blood of your own people, Alek. Bathe in it. Drown in it for all I care. Go on and stay here in this cage and be the pet of Amadeus the Mad." She faced him in her leather coat, links of bone growing from her ears, her eyes dusky with makeup, her lips a bitter, brutal red gash as she leaned forward and breathed in his ear. "But be warned, beloved, there will be a reckoning, a Dies Irae, and it will be sung at the Requiem Ma.s.s of the Covenmaster Amadeus, the betrayer of all our people."

And then she stalked artistically away.

And now, awakening, he realized that she was gone. Out at one of her haunts. On their birthday. Where was she? He wanted to-- I'm here.

He gasped and felt the thin, perfect weight upon him that was not some large tome.

Alek opened his eyes.

She was astride him, her knees locked around his hips. She had undone the b.u.t.tons of his nighshirt in his sleep and her nakedness and heat was soldered to his own as natural as two old links. Her face came up from where it had been lying in the hollow of his throat. Her hands flashed out, greedy and powerful, and pinned his shoulders. She peered down at him from under her sooty lashes as if to observe him from an enormous height. She smiled. She breathed on his face, his throat. "Happy birthday to you," she sang softly as her eyes deepened, blackened. "Happy birthday to you. Happy biiirthday, dear beloved, happy birthday to you..."

He tried to utter her name as if in doing so he could stop her, seize her up in mid-stride, but her mouth was too quick to cover his own and kill the sound. He felt her mind touch his in an intimacy that was new and frightening, and he tried to think of thoughts to anger her, to make her go, but nothing came, no argument, no rebuke, only an unformed plea for completion. She kissed him and he shuddered fiercely beneath her work, the sh.e.l.l carefully placed around him by five long years of Covenpractice, that sh.e.l.l with its volumes and Rites and ordinances, its music and art and study, suddenly cracked open and allowed all the doubt and dread and pa.s.sion to pour into him like strange waters.

His hands sought her back as she leaned over his throat, kissed and licked a seamless path to his lips, her hair tenting them in together. He held her, crushed her to him, body and soul. He shuddered once more, but what she'd destroyed now was the barrier of his own self-consciousness. He lifted the heavy veil of her hair away from her face and kissed her, his teeth hard at her lips, for the first time in years freely admitting his need for her, for the completion that was her. He feared her and he feared he would lose himself in her and would disavow the Coven, but the fear of dying without ever knowing her was far, far worse. And then she was kissing him back and the past and the future were as unreal as shadows, vanishing into only the now, and now there were no rules, no Covens, no names for what they were, no distinctions, no borders drawn by philosophers' hands to separate them from the Children of Eve or the Lilith.

What am I doing?

His eyes fluttered closed under the a.s.sault of her mouth, and he realized all at once that they belonged to all the races, all at once, impossibly, like an ethereal enchantment. She growled deep, her lips yielding, then demanding of him, fitting his as if they were only one body. Her hands slid under his shirt, down further, bold arcs of fire over his chill, a sacred dance across his naked flesh.

What what what am I doing?

And when he ventured forth to do the same, to trace the sacred lines of her perfumed flesh, first with his fingertips and then with his lips, he felt her thoughts, her eagerness, the hunger bottled up inside her all these long years. And his own. And together that one voice abolished the last of reason and Amadeus from his mind.

My life. My blood and flesh and strength. Impossible to say whose thought.

Reaching, he laid his palm to her cheek, touching her carefully, as if she were as delicate as she seemed, and inside the intimacy of the touch he sensed the edge of some shadow, some shade of grief buried deep within her, as if she knew their love could only end in some inevitable goodbye.

"It's all right, Debra," he told her. "I'm here and I won't let us be apart."

Her eyes looked wet, impossibly far away. "You can't know forever, beloved. Don't try."

"I don't un--"

"Quiet, beloved. We have no future and no past. Only this. Only now."

He could make not a sound, could not even move, when her lips brushed away and rested at his temple and he felt her fleet pulse under his mouth, the rush of her blood like the voice of the ocean in his ears. Hesitantly he kissed her throat, first with his lips and then with his teeth, and the yolky, familiar taste he'd not known in a lifetime of five years pooled into his mouth, keening his senses, narrowing them to the point of near pain, where he felt certain they could fly from the very skin of the earth if they so desired.

"Fly with me, Alek," she pleaded in her sweet little voice, impossible to deny. "Tonight. Before it's too late, before--" Her voice cracked on such a sigh of joy and pleasure he found he had no words to deny her.