Sean/Amadeus laughed and Alek recognized the music of the ages of the earth in his hollow voice. The boom of the crashing sea, of thunder, the whirr of insects, the creep of a snake and all things elemental. "I am Covenmaster. All this I command. All that you see is mine. Tell me, what do you have, Slayer?"

His voice came unbidden, without thought. "What I have is what I am. Free." He tossed back his hair to show the lack of a torc about his neck.

Sean/Amadeus smiled with his hybrid of a mouth. "Then you have nothing. Your freedom is a lie. Your life has been in vain. And your love is bitter, Slayer. You are nothing. You were always nothing." He nodded solemnly at his Children.

The creatures smiled eagerly. Together they drove Alek to his knees, pinned his arms to his back until his body was striped with pain Alek choked and cursed the name of Amadeus in the oldest languages of the earth. Yet still the slayers forced his head down, down. And now he saw the currents of ichor lapping in mirrored waves at the pedestal of the Coventable. The creatures pressed his face to the substance and he breathed in its coppery sweetness and its venom. So foul. He tasted the Coven and his master's kisses. He screamed and the ichor filled his throat, choked off and stole his final breath...

"Enough Amadeus. Begone," came a savage little whisper out of the dark.

Amadeus was gone and his Children with him. Just like that. Like magic, an enchantment.

Alek gasped and came up like the drowning man he was. He drank in a greedy mouthful of untainted air and turned to find the owner of the new voice. His true savior. And in that turning the dream turned as well as so often dreams do.

He stood alone in the dark, alone but for a tall woman in a black silk gown and veil, narrow as a stalk, standing at a distance like a mourner at a gravesite, an aura of angel light on her sapphire hair. Savior, he wanted to say, Sweet sweet savior. The woman in her mourning veil and gown beckoned to him, and he rose up immediately and started after her as she began to walk away.

She walked very fast and he had to hurry to keep up with her. He drew abreast of her. He so desperately wished to see the unearthly face of his angel, but her layers of netting veil concealed her features completely from him. All he could see were her eyes. Red, he thought. Red like roses. Yes.

"You saved me," he said.

"Oh yes."

"Why?"

"It waits on you."

"What waits?"

"You know."

"The Ninth Chronicle? The Chronicle is false."

"It waits on you, the false Chronicle."

He touched her arm. "Who are you?" The woman stopped. "Don't you know, beloved?" she asked and turned to face him and drew away her veils like a bride of the night. She sighed and looked on him with such gentle grief. "I lied," Debra said. "I saved you for myself. I was always a selfish creature, but you know that, my most beloved."

Strange that he should feel no fear or astonishment. Only love--love and regret and the sweetest sorrow he'd ever known. Debra. Yet not Debra. Yet her nonetheless. Some new and different Debra. An older Debra.

The woman Debra. Her features ached beauty and her image wounded him like a sword.

He whispered her name like a prayer, the deepest part of his soul begging him to reach out and touch her pale perfect cheek, if only to prove that she was real, that she was really here now, with him.

Yet he held back in the end. He'd failed her, failed her so often in so many ways. He didn't deserve this reunion, if reunion was what this was.

She smiled with infinite sadness. "You never failed me. You promised to love me forever and you kept your promise."

Alek hesitated a moment, contemplated her words. Then he slid to his knees and wept, utterly destroyed by the strength of her absolution. "I believe now, I do. But I can't do it," he wept to her feet. He kissed them.

He laid himself prostrate before her like a repentant at the feet of a saint, his body wracked with sobs. "I can't find the book. I don't know what to do, Debra. I can't--"

"Hush. You can't find your way because you do not have the proper map." She touched his hair and he looked up. She was smiling sadly and offering him her hand. "Take it, Alek. Fly with me. One final time. Fly with me, beloved, as if we are still children."

"I don't understand."

"Then don't."

He hesi t ated only a moment more; then he placed his hand in hers.

They flew, fast and high over rivers of obsidian punctured with stars and silver monoliths corkscrewed into deadly points. They dropped like a breath, soared through darkness and through light, and where they pa.s.sed he saw daybirds on their wires and ledges and high places pluck their heads from beneath their wings and fly with them. They flocked around the twins, guided and escorted them, above and below and all around them, so that everywhere Alek looked he saw nettles of starlings and pigeons, the loose brotherhoods of crow.

Debra? What is this?

Your spectators, beloved. They wait on the final conflict. They stand at the door you seek.

And that door?

She looked down upon their most sacred altar.

He looked as well and he saw and suddenly he knew. There.

There, she agreed. Byron hid it there in his last moments. Because I told him to.

But that's so easy.

Yes, of course.

Alek felt that familiar stir in his chest, that thrill. He wanted so to spiral down and touch that sacred, magical place, if only momentarily. To visit it with her like children with his young hungry heart, to adventure there, to be with her, to be young and silly and free and full of the power of the night--but now she was pulling him back, drawing him up with her, up and away, as easily as smoke caught on a thorn of the wind.

Debra?

Hush, beloved. There will be time for what you must do. For now let there be only this. Only us.

She drew him to her completely, her arms around his neck, her face buried against his throat. And real, oh yes, all of it. He sensed the demanding friction of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s against his chest, her soft, thick, feathery hair real, wreathing them both like her black veils and skirts as they drifted together on the current of the nightwind. And when he kissed and worshipped the redness of her mouth and stroked the long line of her thigh through her gossamer gown and saw the light of mischief and desire in her eyes, it was real, every touch and every sigh. Real, all of it. Real though they clung as ephemeral as wraiths above their midnight metropolis; real though only one of them truly lived.

Impossible, he thought. I dream. Perhaps. But dream with me now, beloved. Make for us some strange new world and in that world make love to me. I've waited so long.

Alek smoothed away the veil of her hair from her face and kissed her desperately, almost fiercely. And there, she tasted the same, the blood of some immortal saint and the dew on roses at midnight. So good and sweet.

His love. I adore you, my beloved, my mate, he told her. And then he made their sacred world and it was down in that infinite other place, a place of light and shadows, color and darkness, that he laid her down and he loved her.

Sean dreamt, and his dreams were all red steel and full of the memory of pain. Pain that bloomed and stretched and turned him inside out, absorbing him, until he was the pain and the pain was him and Sean Stone was only the dream...

He awoke in blindness and in the echo of pain, in confusion. He mewled and pushed himself up against his bed's headboard.

His face ached righteously, man. He touched his face and remembered. Remembered Doc Book's work of putting him back together again, putting together what his feeding could not heal, every screaming, sutured inch of it--and before, what Alek Knight had down to him on the stage of the Empress. The rage, the unfairness of it. Oh, run while you can, man, 'cause you are mine, man. Mine. The memory hurt like pain, like a migraine to all his face...

But there--the pain was going away. Sean found the abrasive end of the sutures and pulled the silvery-red threads from his face one at a time. Then he touched his pretty face, and sure, there were still st.i.tchings of pain and a general tenderness, but, man, he was whole again.

Oh yeah.

Quick--a mirror. He took the sword--Alek's sword lying beside his bed--by the hilt and found his face in its burnished body. Yeah. Double yeah. Gorgeous. He looked like a million bucks again.

His tongue rasped across his fully self-restructured teeth and full pink lips. Whatever else all those slayers b.i.t.c.hed and complained about like sorry-for-their-own-a.s.ses antiheroes in them books and movies, being a vamp, (even half a vamp) sure as h.e.l.l had its advantages. Now if only he wasn't so d.a.m.ned hungry. Could feel his own backbone, man. Maybe he'd drive through Mickey D's tonight and pick up that juicy little window girl who always blushed and giggled and bleated like a sheep when he winked at her.

How did that song from Cutting Crew go? "I just died in your arms tonight," Sean sang and giggled, fell back to the mattress, still giggling, rolling with it.

And that's when the body of the wh.o.r.e fell off his bed and onto the floor. Hadn't even noticed it there, man.

He looked over the side of the bed, at the redhead's greying face and empty, ceilingward stare. Her throat was gone. Not just chewed and sucked man, but f.u.c.king gone. Her head literally hung by strings. The spinal cord, a few ribbons of bloodless flesh and tendon, not much.

Jesus.

Had he done that?

He tried to remember what had happened after the Empress. The march. Trying to catch the rogue. Sucking a few pedestrians in pa.s.sing to keep the psi going and deadened the pain in his face. The blood. The screaming. But not catching the f.u.c.k. Coming back here. Alone.

Alone.

So when had the wh.o.r.e come into play?

Mein Sohn...oh what has become of you?

Sean jerked, remembering now. Remembering...the androidlike woman hovering near like some kind of sacrifice...Amadeus...he shuddered again, more violently...Amadeus feasting, not like some monster in a Hammer film, man, no, not some two-minute Christopher Lee quickie, a lovebite and a few sips. Feasting, man. Like a f.u.c.king animal. The blood a sludgy black rouge on his face and chin and throat and chest. The flesh gnashing, the cartilage crunching audibly between the subhuman teeth. Jesus, those teeth...

And then those teeth, that searing hot mouth on his, not biting, but offering the gift of raw red copper-iron strength in a liquid regurgitation of life itself-- Sean swallowed, giggled hysterically and drew back away from the sight of the wh.o.r.e, his fingers on his mouth, feeling the obnoxious crust of dried blood, his and the woman's, all over his lips and teeth and chin.

He looked again at the body of the woman and realized he had to make a physical effort not to get down on his knees and bury his face in the awful remains. He bit the ham of his hand to stifle the insane noises his mouth was making, but the action only made him grunt and quickly open his jaws. His teeth felt sharper, more prominent, if that was possible. Was that possible? What the h.e.l.l was possible anymore? He was some half-human freak living a nightmare inside of a nightmare. And now he had drunk the life out of some c.u.n.t who could have been his f.u.c.king mother!

Quite abruptly, the whimper gathering in his throat died at the sight of the black bathrobe cast over the foot of his bed. He centered his attention on it because it wasn't his, it was the Father's, and it was something else to look at other than the corpse congealing in a pool of black gore on his bedroom floor. A corpse that had been violated worse than anything that Sean, even with his extensive experience at the Shangri-La, and with Slim Jim, had ever seen.

He crawled like a little boy to the foot of the bed. Curious, he touched the fabric.

Not a bathrobe. A habit.

Put it on, Sean.

With a cry of surprise he leapt from the bed and looked around his room, at the concert posters on the walls, the storybooks and bone collections and CDs scattered wide, at the open-door armoire of falling-out clothes.

But no one was hidden here among his things. He was alone.

Put on the habit, beloved, said the voice inside his head more directly.

Oh. Only the Father and his hocus-pocus. Well...all right.

Sean slid out of the sheer, bloodwashed-stiff nightshirt the Father had dressed him in and shrugged into the habit, struggled with some of the little hook and eyelets, gave up on the rest of them, the ones nearest the small of his back where he couldn't quite reach. He stretched and moved around the bed, trying to get a feel for the material and using the bed to block his view of the corpse. Out of sight of the wh.o.r.e, he found he could think a little more clearly. He went to the full-stretch mirror on the backside of his armoire door.

There was a little too much drag in the hem and sleeves of the habit, but otherwise it was a pretty righteous fit. Quite nice, actually. Quite... impressive. The black did him up well, gave him almost that same big, pale Reaper look the Father had.

He looked closely and realized that even his eyes looked weird. Too light. Pale, whitish blue.

All right, man, now what?

You must be pure. The trinkets--be rid of them.

And almost immediately, without thought or question, Sean unscrewed his facial studs and earrings, broke the wires of teeth around his neck. The pieces shattered like bone on the cell's floor. He touched his face with wonder. What did he look like barren of his trophies? He knew he felt infinitely more powerful somehow, feather-light and capable of flight. Strange and wonderful. Was this the reason the Father chose to live like a f.u.c.king Spartan? Alek too?

He attention returned to the mirror and he was witness to the birth of a new person. He touched the loose yellow silk of his jaw-cut hair, toyed with the idea of letting it go. Long. Rock-musician long. Long enough to plait. Long like Amadeus's was long. He saw himself then: long pale hair and black habit. Pale, somber eyes.

A priest? Yeah, a priest, or at least, priestlike. He though yet again of the wh.o.r.e, and suddenly the thought of living like a priest didn't seem like such a ludicrous idea after all. Before the mirror, he genuflected in the invisible presence of his Coven. "Welcome. I am the Covenmaster Stone Man," he stated, tasting the words and grimacing.

That really sucked.

Inspired, he went through the gesture again. "I am the Covenmaster...Amadeus. I am the Chosen. All that you see I comm--"

Yes, my son. The new temple of Amadeus.

Sean choked, caught in mid-bow, stiffening like a little boy caught doing something obscene to himself. He blushed in the face of the Father's shining laughter, lovely and pious and faintly mad, he thought.

The Father was pleased.

Come to me, beloved, commanded the Father. Enter me and become...

The music of the voice drove the dizziness of his hunger away. Drove the nausea of the image of the dead girl on the floor away. It was like in the beginning. This was the lovely coa.r.s.e voice of the strange man he had found sitting on the sill of his State Inst.i.tution dorm room one night upon awakening, eyes like white fire in a face as pale as the full moon which had beat down upon them both. That night the Father had come to him and had known him by name and had spoken those words low and so intimately to him: Come with me and come into the arms of the Coven, mein Sohn, into those arms which love you best of all. And who could love such a thing as you but one of your own?

Yes who? His mother? His mother was dead. And better off that way. Better dead than a slave to a neverending procession of strange men night after night. Better dead, he thought with a sideways glance at the girl, than a victim of a monster.

And so, without hesitation, Sean let himself out of his cell and started down toward the Great Abbey. He did not feel the cold of the twisting corridors carrying him along, nor the stone steps under his feet, meeting them so graciously as he descended into the beauty and immortal secrets of the old house. The Abbey would receive him and there he would see his beautiful, white-faced Father waiting on him, speaking low the words he so cherished. My love...my own.

But when he arrived he found the Father did not sit in his usual perch at the head of the Coventable; instead, he was kneeling on the dais in the shadow of his altar, the wedge of his pressed hands resting at his mouth, his sight miles off.

The chandelier had been lit, its whitish power bruising the stone walls of the Abbey and blushing the strong old faces on the tapestries. A halo of it circled the Father like an angelic laser of light. Some alien spotlight capable of practically deitizing a man. Sean took in the sight, the chandelier lit for some ceremony, the Abbey itself vacated but for the two of them and a handful of surviving bats irritated to restless flight by the alien impinge of light. Slowly, almost fearfully, he walked to the nave, then up the steps to the dais, so that the two of them, himself and the Father, existed in the Altar's shadow equally.

Sean looked aside at the Father.

Amadeus spoke.

"Alek knows the location of the Chronicle," said the Father.

Sean shuddered but did not show it. The Chronicle. It was half their problem. Their other half, of course, was Alek himself. But the idea, suddenly, of the two problems coming together, converging--Alek actually getting the d.a.m.ned Chronicle--hung like a dooming storm over Sean's thoughts. That lying piece of s.h.i.t book was probably enough to totally unbalance the precarious relationship they already had with Rome. Or so said the Father. "s.h.i.t. Where?"

Amadeus told him.

"There. Christ, that's dumb."

"It is fitting. It is the place of beginnings, and it is just that it be the place of his defeat."

"Is he there now?"

"Nein. His is with her in a place that is closed to me. I know only that he makes love to her, that he drinks of her power and her pa.s.sion."