Why?

Didn't know why. Had to-- Where? The city's a big place, fool.

Silly--he knew. Of course he did. He knew this time without Aristotle's insight and stupid suppositions. He knew-- The beginning place.

"Your empathy must be rubbing off, brother," he said and reached for his coat lying on the floor.

Tahlia cast the cat skull across the full length of her husband's office. It hit the gorgon-face shield like a missile and clattered to her husband's smoking couch in shards.

In a single sweep she cleared the desk of its homey clutter, blotter and banker's lamp, decanter and Roman amphorae, In Files and Out, Charles's tobacco carousel--which struck his favorite stuffed pheasant down from his perch, so what?--books and maps and the framed portrait of Charles the warrior in fatigues between two other men in a faded grey jungle half a world away. All of it in a noisy waterfall to the floor.

There.

Exhaustion displacing rage, Tahlia slumped against the edge of the desk, one hand in her sweaty hair and the other over her heart. You are long over the hill, Tally, whatever the face may say. Gonna give yourself a heart attack. Yeah.

"No!" she answered, and strange this voice: it was not her own. It was the voice of some other Tahlia, some younger Tahlia. The voice of the woman who had sat all night in a cafe on Columbus Street listening to bad beat-generation verse and rattling her gla.s.s and stomping her feet with the best of them as the rest of her withered and curled up like an old rose and died inside. The woman whose heart knew that Byron was never late, never in all their thirteen years late for one of their dates, and that late tonight meant something more than late. The woman who knew that like she knew these Beatniks and their lousy poetry but who was too much a coward to admit to it. The woman who had drunk herself into a vermouth-inspired stupor that night and then drove home to her converted loft apartment in the Brooklyn Heights and cried herself to sleep and stayed, aching, in that bed for three whole days, nursing the horrible knowledge she had like a disease. That woman, the voice of the woman ages younger and not a little feral with emotion, a voice armored in steel and war and all the things that were lost forever.

This new-old Tahlia sobbed, "It can't end this way, kid. Please, please don't let it end this way." And that Tahlia went to her knees in sobs on the floor of her husband's office with the pulsing pounds of gaiety just beyond the walls but years out of reach.

28.

The moon rose and the carrion birds came. Slowly her wounds bled and steadily her pain increased. It seemed as if the nightwind were on fire where it touched her body and the sky was full of screams. The sound of the birds pecking at and squabbling over her b.l.o.o.d.y flesh--her wrists and her face and her b.l.o.o.d.y barren womb where the Covenmaster had chosen to send the final spike instead of her heart--was enough to drive her mad. The birds polluted her mind as badly as her body. All she had to look forward to was the rising sun, when the world would turn red and it would be over. She hoped it was soon; more, she hoped she felt nothing.

Time wore on. Breathing on her broken back was a nightmare. Existence itself was a greater horror. How she prayed to die, then, not for the first time ever, no, but never with such vehemence. She cursed G.o.d and Lilith and Paris and Alek Knight and all those who had sent her down her path of destiny to be here now in this living h.e.l.l. She wept, feeling a horrible void of self-pity opening up beneath her and sucking her down its great length. Where was grace now, now that she needed it? Where was mercy? She had not disobeyed her G.o.d, nor her destiny. Only they had conspired to set her up against an invincible foe. There was no hope for the world, she realized. The slayers were worse than the monsters they chased. And they were spreading across the face of the earth, slowly, calculatingly, maiming and destroying, making a barren No Man's Land of her people's world.

Her people. They would never know the secret of their blood now. The secret of their true origin. Now, with the Chronicle back in the hands of the churchmen, they would never know safety again.

The birds found her inner secrets through the hole in her loins and she heard herself scream inside her own head, heard the ringing echo of her own tormented, skybound curses.

And that was when the man came and stood beside her in her darkness and her agony, the man in the cleric's robes. Not robes like now, finely-crafted and sewn with threads of gold. This was a cleric of the Reformation, the Renaissance. The learned, worldly cleric in rough black robes and a tarnished papal cross that was all he had to denote his statue in life. He was tall and lean, his long, white-blonde hair combed back carefully over his ears. She looked at his beautiful hands, his piercing black, pious eyes, and felt her heart stutter inside of her. She had forgotten the light he could emanate despite his darkness. The beautiful torment of his touch, his kisses. She had forgotten...so much. "Paris," she said through numbed lips.

He put one finger to his lips. Shhh. He smiled. My beloved. His eyes flicked aside to where she thought the betrayer Aragon must be standing. It was so hard to tell, pinned to the ground like she was. Lost in the dark the way she was. "Someone might hear," he whispered in his native Dutch.

"Take me home," she gasped in her native Italian. She could not remember Dutch. She could not remember anything, her pain was so great.

"Not yet," he said with gentle patience. And then he looked on her with such love that she could not find the pain anymore. It was as if he had eaten it all up with his gentle, wanting gaze. "My Teresa," he said. "Will you give up on yourself?"

She shook her head no.

Paris smiled and beckoned to her. "I'm waiting."

"I...no, Paris..."

The others might have heard her, except that Paris had cast the birds away and their escape was like thunder.

She was sitting up, her hands torn and frayed to rags but set like stone around the end of the railroad spike protruding from her womb. She gripped it, her hands burning like wax around the cursed metal, and pulled the spike from her belly. It came out of her like the scream she dared not utter. She lay down again on the ground, for a moment so overcome with sickness she wondered if she would ever move again, if she couldn't simply pa.s.s this cup by. If Paris wouldn't simply forgive her and come get her.

Will you give up on yourself, my Teresa?

Somehow she managed to sit up again, to climb like a staggering victim of battle to her feet. Her back was partially mended, but her hands bled. Her womb bled. She was hungry, so hungry. The iron's poison was still in her veins, but perhaps it had lost some of its potency. She took one step, and then she took another.

She saw she was coming slowly upon the two who had crucified her. They were mere fuzzy black images, her vision was so bad. She closed her eyes and found she could track them better by their warmth. The slayers, the small one and the bully, stood a dozen paces apart and watching their master twine with Alek Knight on the ground before the carousel. She was closest to the bully. She withdrew Paris's knife.

It felt heavy in her hand, but to give up now...Paris would never forgive her. She took yet another step.

And then she was upon the bully.

She never did like the cross.

A silly, stupid thought, but the one that gripped his mind in the moment before it happened. Over the Father's shoulder, Alek watched the a.s.sault. Such a small, weak-looking creature, and yet when provoked she was like a battalion, unstoppable and extraordinary. He watched her sink the knife into the back of Robot's head, through skull and blood and grey matter, all of which exited the wound she made in a loose, chunk-filled geyser. Robot made a sound--a peculiar sound like a cobra taken from behind by a weasel, perhaps the only sound he had ever made in his whole long life--and dropped lifelessly to his face a mere dozen yards from Aristotle. And yet, so captivated was Aristotle by the Rite before him, the whole a.s.sault went completely unnoticed by him.

Teresa pulled the knife loose from the sucking cavity of the slayer's skull and put her mouth there a moment, taking some nourishment from the wound. Then she took a few shambling steps forward, and, with her resurgent strength, plunged it into Aristotle's back. Aristotle wasn't so silent. Aristotle screamed b.l.o.o.d.y murder, falling to the ground and scrabbling at the gravel path like a c.o.c.kroach some poor fool had impaled on the floor of his Bronx tenement apartment.

Amadeus jerked away and turned. "You," he whispered the word like a snake hissing a warning. And then he let loose with a torrent of almost tangible psi force.

Like a block of mortar cast into a peaceful stream, the shockwaves rippled out. Alek felt it in those first seconds, the spun web of terrible force spinning out like a net, the threads of living violence collapsing the foliage around them, rippling the earth and seeking its victim. Carnage. A canopy of rickety maples crackled inward in a cavity, pulverized as if a great and invisible giant had pa.s.sed there. A cannonball of wild energy ricocheted off the street between two stalled cars, cratering the asphalt, then crossed the avenue like a skipping stone and burst against the face of the Metropolitan, tearing down the Horses of San Marco banner. A small awry sphere buffeted past Alek and bounced around the inner canopy of the carousel in dreamcatcher pattern. And in that moment he thought of himself and Sean in another close place in another time with Sean's psi a demented wraith seeking its return current. Alek saw the force go to Teresa like a speeding subway train, like a trained pit bull terrier set loose on its hapless victim. Teresa raised her arms, but it would never be enough, never.

Alek closed his eyes, opened his mind to Amadeus's stolen psi. He called to it sweetly and softly. And like a fish it sought its birth fount.

The energy struck Amadeus squarely in the chest. Not like a fish. Like an iron musket ball.

The force split the two of them apart like a hammered bone, struck Amadeus from the stage and cast Alek in the opposite direction, into a straight steel panel of the carousel house.

Hurt in his skull and eyes. His stomach, oh G.o.d, his stomach. Alek blinked and then dropped over into the track, touched his face to it in agony as the venom churned like steel knives in his belly. He tried to feel himself, but himself was like a distant character he no longer had any interest in. Red, searing pain. Black despair. Loss. It was as if those two colors were the only ones left in all the world. To die--perhaps then he would be free of this pain. He arched and slammed his face against the floor of the carousel. The pain lessened, then came crashing back like a tidal wave. He fell to his side, immobilized by it.

Darkness.

From far away he tasted once more the shed blood of a G.o.ddess. Achingly sweet. Foreign but potent. Before his mind even knew it, his body was hungrily sucking up the substance. A swallow. And then another. Pain.

But it was the pain of mending. The itch of recovery. After a few moments the flow lessened, and at first he thought it was because his body was running out of blood, but then he realized it was because his body was healing, turning back on its own strength, which should have been impossible with so much of the master's blood and will inside of him. Yet after a moment or two his vision cleared and he was able to see clearly again.

Teresa lay beside him, feeding him blood from her own cupped hand.

He shook himself. For a moment he thought it meant she was recovering. But then he saw that her horrible wounds had not healed at all. Her eyes halved, registering his sorrow but smiling even now. Even now, with her hair cruelly cropped and her face a map of half-healed scars, she was alluring and ancient and provocative. He wanted her, even in her curtain of red death.

"Only enough life--for you," she said.

He pushed her hand away. "No..."

"You are only hope." She forced yet more of her blood down his throat, feeding him from the gaping red wounds on her wrists, forcing him to feed by stroking his throat like a child might a sick kitten, and it was suddenly as if the current of her life and the many lives she had taken and made her own was overwhelming the invading will. He gasped and swallowed, and he felt it die slowly within him. A warm silence stole over his body. He was certain the Father's venom in his system had been nullified. Yet inside he was still in torment. Even as he sat up, Teresa seemed to lose strength and lay back down. The wounds in her were ma.s.sive and black with gangrene, the rot of the iron shot almost entirely through her system, and he cringed because he feared that if any more of her flesh was eaten up by this cancer that he would see her heart beating, or slowing down. He tried to open a wound in his wrist, to drip blood over her parched and broken lips, but she stopped him.

"Too late," she said. She shook her head.

Another death. Another death he could not bear.

"No," he moaned.

She raised her left hand and touched his hair. "Are you so afraid, caro?"

The tears on his face were red. They would stain his skin, he thought, and he could carry those scars for the rest of his days, out into the world where people could see it. The slayers. The humans. The ones in between. All of them. He wanted to bury his face in her chest, but he was afraid he would hurt her more. So he took the hand she touched him with and he kissed it.

His voice was choked. "You shouldn't have done this. I'm not worth it, beloved."

That amused her. "I do what I want. And you do what you must. You are more human than you know.

More human than me...or him. You are the new breed...hope. Yes." Her eyes focused on the stars, her breathing harsh and painful to hear. A spasm shook her body and he heard her heart skip as she began to die. Sobs racked his body. "Don't...please..."

She looked at him with her usual impertinence. "...coming."

He looked around, but there was nothing to see. No one coming. No one that he could see, at least. His heart hammered. "How do I stop him? Teresa! Tell me what to do!"

"Her," she gulped, "she knows."

"Who? Debra? You mean Debra?"

"She always knew." A convulsion suddenly gripped her, and her body arched up off the floor. His tears were a river. All those deaths, all those years of the sword, had not prepared him for this. To see another lover die.

Yet Teresa, with her failing strength, pulled his hand down and touched her tongue to the tip of his finger, a gesture so final and yet so erotic he felt the need for her to the very pit of his stomach. "She knows how--" A sigh escaped her lips and her eyes brightened like church gla.s.s with the sun setting behind it. Inside her chest he heard her immortal heart stop, but there was air left in her lungs and she said in that special soft voice of hers, "Mio amante, il Cronaca..."

Those were her last words. She was gone, back to the fabled web from which all their kind were reputed to come.

The world began to move like a filmstrip before his eyes. Alek stood up with Teresa's body cradled in his arms and wondered if the rage and the sudden loss had made him mad. No. Heat and life. From deep inside the carousel came a rusty long growl, the snarling of locked gears frozen too many years turning over, sparking to life, the carousel trying to move, enlivened by something, a stray bit of Amadeus's psi, he supposed.

The irony of it. He felt a soft, salty laugh from deep within: Debra's savage joy, now his merciless own. Alek sneered at Amadeus, inside his mind and out. Didn't the Father see? He hadn't cheated the prophecy after all. The animals were running for him, and the midnight sun would shine and this was to be the last night the world would tolerate the existence of a monster.

He jumped to the ground and set Teresa's body down. He stood up. He felt nothing. "Where are you?" he whispered. "You coward, you son of a b.i.t.c.h, where are you?"

Nothing. G.o.dd.a.m.n nothing.

No--something. Something moved toward him in slow, agonizing, movie-mummy steps. Someone.

He waited. And after several minutes the figure closed the distance between them.

Aristotle, the iron knife still in his back, dropped to his face at Alek's feet.

"Please..." He sobbed, scrabbled at Alek's booted foot like a digging dog. "I don't want to die." His tears and snot had turned to ice beneath his chin.

Alek picked him up by the collar of his slayer's coat.

Aristotle hung limp and shuddering in Alek's hold. "It hurts..."

"I know," he answered gently. He looked into the suffering depths of Aristotle's eyes. "So did she hurt."

Aristotle shook his head. "It hurts so bad, so bad..."

Alek shook his head. "You hurt her. You watched."

Aristotle's eyes widened as if he realized what was about to happen and decided it was worse, far worse, than having an iron knife stuck in his back. He tried to move, but the poison was too deep in his body to allow him that kind of strength. It was no challenge at all for Alek to drop the kid and take his jaw firmly in one hand and to sink his fingers into Aristotle's mouth with the other and with one rending jerk to tear the top half of the slayer's head off his spasming body.

The body flopped, bleeding and dying like an eel dry-drowning on the ground at his feet. Alek watched, unfeeling and unmoved until the body lay still and twisted in the crimson snow.

Memento mori, Alek...memento mori...

Alek turned to face the chilled phantom voice at his back and felt steel lick pa.s.s his cheek, draw blood like a vampire's kiss. He lunged away from the thirsty Hanzo blade and slammed into the carousel stage.

He stood, rocked sideways, fell to kneeling, stood again as the king slayer moved in for the kill. Too much.

Too fast. He dropped to his knees again and reached for and loosened Booker's tachi from his coat as Amadeus closed the six foot gap between them and started to swing his sword toward Alek's head. Above came a muddy rendition of "Stardust", redoubling in velocity like the track of the carousel. Seething, ferocious with hate and full of broken music, Alek reached blindly and snagged the hilt of the tachi. Waited-- waited until the king slayer was within reach, waited until the Hanzo blade began to fall, waited until the last possible moment--then swung the sword at the beacon of pale face and hair.

In one impossibly graceful gesture, Amadeus changed the course of his weapon in mid-fall, blocked the incoming blade with his sword, reached and took Alek abruptly by the front of the coat with his free hand and cast him shuddering into the stage again.

Pain, but dim and distant this time. Alek got halfway up and met the Covenmaster's blade over his upturned face, the swords screeking down to the tsubas, holding, holding, Alek trying to push but no leverage, Amadeus smiling, trembling, holding--what was he waiting for?--then underbalancing the crucifix of blades and stepping aside as Alek pitched forward and rolled away from the descending Hanzo blade.

Alek found his feet, his tachi slapped willfully around to meet Amadeus's sword edge to edge. They slid off each other, not war but ceremony. Alek danced back, then up to the stage, slipping between the animals for protection. He eyed this man, this thing he scarcely knew, and yet knew too well. "I loved you once," he whispered above the dull roar of the great whirling toy protecting him from the Father's blade, "but you took everything from me, you f.u.c.ker, and now all my love is turned to hate."

Amadeus hissed like a beautiful reptile. "What I took you gave me freely, you little prost.i.tute." He smiled without emotion. He showed the tips of a pair of horrifying teeth. Not vampiric. Predatory. The teeth that had ended the life of Byron and a hundred thousand others, for all Alek knew. "You drooled for me; for your pa.s.sion, you bled for me." His smile grew, a leer the likes of which Alek had never before seen. "You belong to me. And you will die for me. Come..." He gestured like an artist inviting a subject into his loft. Like a vampire welcoming a virgin victim.

Alek was no virgin. He held his ground, pointed the sword at his master like an accusing finger. "So the church will absolve you and make you their favorite little dog again." He shook his head. "All those people you killed, all those f.u.c.king people. Akisha and Byron and Paris and Teresa. And you did it for the f.u.c.king church." Again he shook his head. "I think I hate you because of that more than anything. So don't call me a prost.i.tute, you hypocrite. At least I didn't sell my will to the church. At least I have that much pride left."

The white eyes narrowed. Amadeus twisted his head unnaturally to one side. "I serve the church and you serve her. We two are equally guilty of our pa.s.sions."

"At least when I say I did what I did for love and pa.s.sion I'm not a lying c.u.n.t," Alek said and threw his weight against the blade through a break in the animals.

Amadeus met and deflected the blade. Pushed him aside. Alek landed on his feet, turned, swung it slantwise for the Father's face, missed, but there--against the fire of violence there was a kind of double light.

Amadeus stood back, his sword with its attached hand at his feet. He smiled and Alek saw no blood come.

Only milky whiteness, only writhing shapes, sinewy shadows...

"Christ."

"I'm afraid not," said Amadeus, stooping to retrieve his sword and hand. He replaced the hand, and the white, bloodless flesh healed itself tight almost immediately. "Very good. You forget nothing. Now again," he spoke as if this were but a simple sparring match.

Monster. Half-thing.

They came together again and again, Alek strong, Amadeus older, stronger. The sparks they made were like embers glowing through the darkness. There was no way of winning, not fairly, not against a man who lived by the sword...

Alek feigned left and threw his shoulder against the master. The two of them went down in a tangle of arms and legs and teeth and swords. The Hanzo blade came screaming up for Alek's throat; Alek palm-heeled it flat to Amadeus's chest. The blood of our enemy, he thought and exercised the weapons so much more natural to his species: he bit deep into his master's throat, shredding the minor artery under Amadeus's ear, growling and foaming the blood back out of his mouth and nostrils. He shook himself, thrashed, tried to peel the flesh away from that one vulnerable spot in a great wet chunk.

Something insinuating slithered into the cup of his ear. Something else sank its needlelike fangs into his shoulder.

Alek let his prey go, batted at the halo of death trying to enfold him--the serpents--he jerked back away, sliced at them with the tachi, or tried to, but the tachi was too long to work in such close quarters. The serpents lashed at him, tore at the flesh of his face, bit the skin on the backs of his hands scorchingly. He couldn't decide which was a worse noise, the cacophony of the carousel or the deafening hiss of the medusan crown trying to slice him to pieces. Finally, he lifted the tachi high, the hilt pointing down at Amadeus, and tried to bash his master's face in. Amadeus caught it. Twisted it.