Found he had no heart to.

So much to say, to tell her, show her...and if she left him, what then? What would he be without her? He didn't know, didn't want to discover what. So he told her yes, yes, beloved, because he must and because he chose to, and kissing her, disentangling himself from her, he prepared to leave with her that very night.

"You can't go, you can't!"

Alek packed the lost of their things in a single suitcase, his and Debra's favorite books and clothes and sketches, Debra's doll. He touched Debra's magic ring at his throat on its chain and looked up, It was early evening, just after practice in the Abbey, just before dinner, and Booker stood by the dolphin window, the diffused bluish light of dusk on his cheek and white cotton oxford shirt, giving his upper half the all-over look of grey marble, a statue scarcely alive. But his eyes moved, blinked, fluttered with disbelief.

"For chrissakes, Alek--"

"I can't stay, Book. Not...now." He tossed aside his skein of too-long hair and forced the last articles into the carpetbag, shirts and trousers, no habits, a pair of scissors, no sword. The sword remained cased and untouched under his bad. Almost a shame, it was such a beautiful piece of art, hut where would he need it?

"You don't understand what it's like. I belong to her, it's--hard to explain."

"You'll be just like her," Booker argued. "The Father says. You'll turn..."

But Book just didn't understand, couldn't understand. Booker was homeless without the Coven, familyless.

Booker was the Father's son; Alek was only his resident.

And, of course, Booker didn't have Debra.

"Turn into what?" Alek asked, angry now, angry for a target. "A f.u.c.king bat? f.u.c.king Bela Lugosi?"

"You know what. Christ, Alek, you can't just walk out!"

"Keep your voice down!" he hissed, sitting on the suitcase to squash it and latch it tight.

Booker flared his nostrils and looked at the window. Hot in here suddenly. Alek wished Book would cut it out with that s.h.i.t. Did he want the bedclothes to go up?

He stopped fiddling with the latch, narrowed his eyes on his chosen brother. "Look, Book--"

"Has the Father given you the Rite of Blood?" Booker demanded, turning back around.

"What?"

"The Rite of Blood," Booker repeated, sounding now angry himself, indirectly betrayed. "Have you tasted his blood?"

Alek lifted the suitcase, almost did not answer, then set it down. "What kind of question is that?"

"Answer it."

"No."

"You have."

"It's none of your f.u.c.king business if I have or not!" Alek shouted, momentarily forgetting to hush his voice. He shivered, held still a moment, held his breath and wondered if the Father would stalk in any moment in a storm of black robes and find him like this, in the midst of betrayal. But Amadeus did not mystically appear and Book only continued to look wounded, ever more betrayed. They'd never kept secrets from each other, the two of them, they were brothers, d.a.m.nit, but this thing-- "You never told me," said Booker.

Alek hefted the suitcase and this time did not set it down. "It doesn't matter to me," he said.

"It matters to him. You belong to the Father. He'll hunt you down."

What did he care? He'd shared blood with Debra. But in that case it was different; the blood was Debra's, belonged to her. With Amadeus it was only borrowing. Amadeus understood that. "He won't hunt me," he retorted, and his voice sounded very brave and sure to himself, sort of like the cheer of a Viking before they went into battle, he thought. Why shouldn't it? "He loves me, he said so. And he's always let us come and go."

"He lets Debra come and go."

Alek shook his head and walked in his streetclothes to the door of his cell. Why was he arguing over an already done act? Useless. The pact was sealed with their blood, his, Debras. Not borrowed, born. He'd promised Debra to love her forever. He twisted the doork.n.o.b and spoke without turning. "You going to tell him I'm gone, Book?"

"I don't need to, brother," he answered.

Under the white scythe of the moon he walked. He walked through the park, toward the housy familiar shape of the carousel, toward Debra and her Byron. He was to meet the two of them here for their midnight rendezvous and flight from the city.

Byron was an artist and Road Hog, said Debra, had connections wherever the road went. Byron, the modern gypsy. And where would they go? Anywhere, said Debra. Once she arranged it they could travel to Hollywood and be actors in big films, or go to the South and the swampy warmth of sinister New Orleans where Byron said all the creatures of the night were. They could go anywhere, do and be anything. Anything at all.

And they'd be together forever.

They could love each other forever.

He reached the carousel and saw that it was still and vacated, with only the spare rouletting of the revolver and the soft thunder of the wind caught in the canopy to greet him. Where was Debra and Byron? He stopped and looked around, searching for some clue.

There, on the opposite side of the carousel, was a trike. Byron's?

Alek minced around the big wheel of animals to the other side. Yes, a trike, grey and silver, with an odd black hobby horse's head set between the handlebars. He touched it and looked up.

Byron lay, stretched lean, on the track between two horses, his head turned aside and his eyes watching Alek with something akin to amazement, offense. Yet they saw nothing at all. Alek was certain it was Byron, ponytailed black hair, black real Gypsy eyes, too tall for his thinness. It might have been himself at twenty- five or thirty, and so it must be Byron whom Debra seemed to trust.

He wasn't dead long, not at all. The carousel ticked forward a little on its revolver and the moon, which before had seemed pale and elusive, illuminated the torn bloodless throat, not vampiric in appearance but purely carnivorous. And again the angry, surprised eyes.

Alek dropped his suitcase.

And ran like h.e.l.l.

He reached the Covenhouse, let himself in, and went immediately down to the Abbey. It seemed the most logical thing to do somehow, though in fact he could not recall really considering any other option in his short, furious flight home. The Abbey. There was sanctuary there if nowhere else, a place for him to hide, alone, and think and stifle his fear and try and understand what was going on. Perhaps a place of divine revelation.

He tripped on the forty-fifth mason's step and fell into the Abbey, prostrate on the floor. He could not move.

He wept soundlessly though he felt curiously devoid of emotion.

He shook and felt like a fool. Debra's fool. After a moment he climbed to his feet.

He was not alone, after all.

So.

Amadeus stood waiting on him at the foot of the altar, dressed all in his black, the negative mane of his hair tinted gold by the holocaust of candlelight filling the void of the Abbey with its warmth. The chandelier had been lit for ceremony.

And there on the ap.r.o.n of the altar, in the shadow of the golgotha, lay Debra and Hanzo's katana. Alek swallowed and steadied himself against a sudden rising tide of panic. It was horrible, the sight of her laid out like that. Almost like a funeral.

"You had to know," said Amadeus without moving, this man who had taken him to the Lincoln center only two days ago and made him gaze upon the beauty of the dying Bohemian. "Verstahen. Sometimes it is necessary to be cruel; often it is the greatest kindness of all."

Alek steadied himself, walked the promenade to the altar, drawn on by the sight of the womanish girl in her black and red lying on the dais. He touched her face, moved the Medusan tangles from her still features. Her mouth was dirty red, her hands the same; her eyes were open and she breathed sharply, but she reacted not at all to his contact. Was she alive? Was she dead? Somewhere in between? Something brutal as a serpent and bitterly poisonous twisted inside him, choked the words into his throat like venom up from his bowels.

"Father...what...?"

"She came here to find you," Amadeus whispered. "Her young man was not the savior she expected. He wanted her but not her lover, and when she insisted, when she grew too bold, he threatened your life. He did not understand the nature of the beast."

No. Not again. Not again, G.o.dd.a.m.nit!

He said, softly, "Debra?" And shook her.

No blinking, no answer. Nothing. Nothing at all.

He sat her up and looked at her. Belladonna eyes, black as quags. Nothing there. But she could not be broken. If she was, he would know. Should know. But now as he touched her mind he felt only the presence of her absence. No wrenching or bursting. No sense of severance, only a void, deep and black and utterly still, as if what he held in his arms was dead but undeparted. Filled with the Abyss and the Lilith they all feared so much.

Undead.

"Turned," spoke Amadeus. "Her Bloodletting has crushed her mind, taken her from us--"

He shuddered, shook her violently. "Debra!" he screeched.

She looked through him.

"Debra! Look at me!"

"Alek."

He stopped shaking her and looked at the Father as Debra's spent, weightless little body dropped onto his right shoulder. For a moment, looking upon Amadeus, the light behind him and silhouetting his darkness, he resembled something else, something gaunt and almost misshapen, something with pale filmy eyes. And in his mind, Alek again saw Byron and Wilma Bessell as they both had been, throats raw and open, screamless, eyes flat and seeing nothing, depthless, and Debra overtop the carnage with her similar eyes and her mouth slathered red like the open, hungry jaws of a lioness.

Debra. It wasn't fair. Why had she not listened to the Father, to him? Why had she not bound herself and learned her lessons and been good? They were children born of an unholy union, said the Father, and punished for their parents' sin by being dangled continuously over the Abyss. No, not fair. Not fair at all.

Why did the sins of the parents have to be visited upon the children?

So the Father wept for them both. "Show her then, Alek, her beloved, the kindness that birth withheld her."

Alek held her fiercely, and yet there w as a second, curiously harsher pain in his soul. It was like a muscle stretched too far and aching in release. "We don't slay our own," he repeated their creed, the words oddly foreign in his mouth, a sob, wet and almost soundless. Amadeus moved out of the light and a little ways away, as if his presence here amidst this catharsis suddenly embarra.s.sed him. "Debra is no longer our own. I think you know that. I think you know what she is and what must be done," he said with a gentle ache in his voice. "She has let the serpent in and now she is poisoned." He shook his head, looked away. "Come and be one of us, Alek. Be one of the alive. Put to the grave the dead and make it so that our cursed half-existence is not repeated."

The Grand Testing. The final vow, sealed with blood.

He turned and looked at the sword lying innocently before the eyes of a thousand unseeing victories. A virgin. Like himself.

But it wasn't supposed to be like this...

"Turn now," said Amadeus, coming forward to lift up and offer him the sword, "and you turn indefinitely, for she will sink you unknowing into the Abyss until the light is an anathema to you and you become one of the hunted."

He looked at the beautiful weapon. Amadeus. Debra. The Chronicle. The b.i.t.c.h. Flight. The Coven. Blood and light. Darkness and fire and the eternal living d.a.m.nation of a soul with no prayers and no escape. He promised to love her forever. And love was selfless. Love was peace, closure.

He took the sword from the Father. He looked at his reflection in the steel he kept so oiled and polished.

"Alek," asked Amadeus.

"No!" he wailed, turning away.

But Amadeus was not looking at his outburst and betrayal. He was staring at Debra.

Alek turned.

She was almost upon him, the teeth almost in his throat, her cry in his ear.

He slashed the edge of the sword across the tenderness of her carotid artery and she fell back hard against the altar. Like a rag doll.

No!

He dropped the sword, abhorring it now, finally, and dropped to one knee. He caught his sweet, wicked sister's head before it could hit the floor and tipped it forward, momentarily stanching the overflow of blood down the front of her dress, the blood that was everywhere, the blood that was his. He coughed, tasted her loosened blood in his own throat. She was drowning. He kissed her mouth one last time in remembrance, her still, soulless black mouth, and told her he loved her as the dark light faded from her eyes.

What did you do? What...?

He stood up. He felt nothing. The Abyss was gone.

He looked at his fallen, b.l.o.o.d.y sword. He was surprised to find how light it had become. It had grown into a part of him over the last five years and be could wield it now like a wing.

25.

Alek dreamt, and in his dream he stood in the crawling shadow of the altar of the golgotha with Teresa before him as still as a stone statue in his arms, his sword at her exposed throat. And the Father said, at a distance, "Show her then, beloved, the kindness that death withheld her." And at those sweet evil words Alek saw his own eyes in the steel of the sword and spoke her name, Teresa, Sister Teresa, and dropped his weapon and buried his face in her shoulder. And with his lips alone he took her, drank her, became her, slowly, painfully, each long swallow of her darkness a labor. And Amadeus roared hoa.r.s.ely, and the altar at their backs fell to pieces.

Now came a river of skulls, an ocean of them, some ancient, the skulls of Separatists and Colonists and Tories, some little older than he was himself, some younger. And under their a.s.sault he was smote and buried alive. And as each of those living horrors with their feral, cheated emotions covered him he felt himself weaken, becoming more a part of the hollow beast, until, at long last, his will was gone.

Hands had him then, two pairs; they dragged him up and finally he looked upon his saviors and slayers, their flesh flawless as ice, their black deathlike coats and long hair and opal alien eyes and the studded silver torcs they wore about their necks that he had never noticed on a slayer before. The slayers hissed his name with their black, unfurling little snakelike tongues. They squealed between themselves in their old language and dragged him free of his prison of bones.

He fought them and he was but a toy in their able hands.

"My children, bring me the Judas," crooned a dry, scouring voice.

The creatures jerked him up, held him high and tight and immovable between them. One of the creatures dragged his head back by the hair to see. And there at the head of the Coventable sat the Covenmaster. And the Covenmaster was Sean Stone in black habit and white hair. He cradled the mystical Hanzo sword in his arms, but the hilt was changed now, not white jade. Obsidian, tainted. Alek looked his master over with wonder. Sean's body was innocent of trinkets, and the purity of the image was the most horrible sight of all.

Had he ascended? Had this lunatic become Covenmaster in his place through the Dominatio?

Sean's smile was demure, his pale eyes devoutly crazed. And when he spoke, his voice carried a vastness inside it that went far beyond his years. "I am the Covenmaster Amadeus," he said.

Not the Stone Man anymore. Of course. He had become the Father as Alek was once meant to be. He was the sh.e.l.l. The...host?

"I am Amadeo, Asmodeus. Aragon. I am the Chosen. I am der Vampir sklavischer. I am the Coven. Who are you?"

"Alek," he heard himself stammer. "Slayer of slayers."