Amadeus was sure to live forever then.

But he had his vows. He wasn't yet Covenmaster; he didn't yet hold the privilege of judging his brethren.

G.o.d help Sean if he ever did. Disgusted, he cast the whelp away from him and into a small cl.u.s.ter of trash cans with a noisy splash of dented tin and flat, dervishing lids. Sean whimpered and blinked his disbelieving eyes where he lay among a month's worth of refuse.

Alek flung aside the whelp's sword and turned away, his teeth locked so perfectly together he sampled his own blood in his cheek. He drew his own sword and crouched down over the girl's laboring body. He brushed blonde strands of hair from her face. The beauty under her fear surprised him, made his fingers tremble a little when he put the back of his hand to her ruined cheek. His touch seemed to stop her labored breath, her pain, her panic. He sensed great distance, time and knowledge, high places and low, a locked door...

Her face jumbled and ran like rain. With effort be wrenched his mind away, a mind that so wanted to live inside of others, his vampiric mind. He murmured meaningless words of closure and comfort as he buried his hands in her hair and jerked his sword gently across the exposed bow of her neck. Somehow, another beheading seemed an unnecessary evil.

Her body collapsed with the slightest of murmurings, like a sleeper awakening or only returning to dreams.

And in that way, her life bled away.

Sean sat up and screeched thinly, the sound like that of a starved beast robbed of its meat. Alek spun around at once, his sword barring his own throat in defense. But the punk had not even moved out of his position; be only smiled at Alek, glared at the sword lying at Alek's feet.

Alek stamped his foot forward over the sword, but the weapon was being summoned with astonishing mental power; he skated off the steel and went to one knee with a grunt. The sword skipped effortlessly along the ground and into Sean's hand like a pet returning eagerly to its master.

Then the whelp's body shot upward, casting off tin lids like discarded bits of armor. His face writhed as he charged, legs scissoring, shoulders bunching into the precise arc of his swing.

"Don't," Alek said. Sean came anyway. Alek parried the blade in pa.s.sing, shouldered the dumb s.h.i.t away from him. Both Sean and his blade clattered to the alley floor.

"Whelp," Alek growled. He stepped in and effortlessly b.u.t.terflied his katana. Sean's necklace of teeth chittered down and pelted the ground around him like rain. Sean looked up. Fear, he would see now, thought Alek, a silent plea-- But Sean only smiled, laughed. "You're crying, jelly bean," he said. "The mighty Chosen One is crying like a f.u.c.kin' baby!" He laughed harder, rolled to his feet, still laughing, laughing. His laughter whined on the concave undersides of the trash can lids, made a noisy coven of crow arrow out of their roost in the city's hidden heights. "You are righteously tipped, man, you know that?" Sean screamed. "Righteously, f.u.c.kin'

tipped!"

Alek touched the warmth on his face. Tipped. A profanity. Slander. Tipped was Debra, not him. Filth. It was all filth falling from the filthy mouth of a little s.h.i.t with no judgment and no sense. How he hated Sean, the little Judas, his mouth already sweetened rottenly with the kiss of death.

He stepped in and slapped Sean across the face.

Sean spanked against the brick wall, his laughing face seizing up into a corpselike rictus. One hand tentatively explored the spayed red mark on his face. "You hit me," he said with astonishment. "Tipped motherf.u.c.king b.a.s.t.a.r.d, I can't believe you hit me! n.o.body hits the Stone Man! n.o.bODY!" His eyes shrank to screws.

Alek stiffened. In his mind he saw a plate-gla.s.s dust shield spider, he saw a sword skating along the ground as if drawn by a powerful magnet, he saw, in the boy's mind, a sharp black-pointed pencil streak off a desk and stick like a dart in another boy's left eye. He leapt backwards as he felt Sean's vengeful spirit claw reach for him. He raised his arms and his mind in a shield as it tried to envelope him.

The loosened psi talent hit his barrier and halted. Alek shuddered violently, felt it coil back onto itself. Sean's eyes narrowed to mere threads as he bore down with the unleashed fury of his mind. New brood, thought Alek, newer than even his own generation. And maybe stronger. Alek grunted as he was rocked back against the wall by the crushing weight of the boy's psi. Christ, but he couldn't do this, couldn't hold back this kind of t.i.tan force trying to shove him through three feet of bricked wall.

The air shimmered with distortion like heat rising off the deadpan of the desert at high noon. Slender black cracks trickled up the flanks of the derelict tenement building on their left. A window on the third floor burst into diamond rain. A fire escape fastened to a wall like a giant alien insect squealed as its metal bones were methodically reshaped. The soft, dying, warbling bodies of pigeons pelted the ground from the broken clerestory high above them like wadded-up ma.s.ses of tissue ...

And it was enough.

The idiot. He'd no idea what he'd unleashed. Sean's psi was coupling and expanding between them and before very long even Alek with all his experience would not be able to balance that fireball of power over their heads. He wasn't certain what would. And when he was spent, what then? He could imagine the sphere of psi breaking apart like a gla.s.s meteor, sparks of wild energy set free-wheeling into the night to fall like rampaging stars all over the city.

And the brunt of It, the body, falling back on the source, into Sean Stone. In its present state the energy would have the power to punch the heart from his chest and twist his limbs out of their sockets with the ease of an angry child dismembering a doll. Would serve him right, too.

But no such pleasure. The power had to be dealt with, had to. It was Coven law. His law.

Alek closed his eyes. It was always easiest to work in the dark, to see as Amadeus saw. In the dark there were no limitations. The mind's eye was infinite. And with infinite care Alek extended a beckoning finger of his own empathic talent toward the swarm of angry energy. It came eagerly. Alek's finger expanded, became a full talon that cradled the wild globe of loosened energy carefully, almost with reverence.

Then his mind spiraled up, pulling free of the bruised alley. It drifted weightlessly over the cold black sea of the city with its many blinking eyes and patchwork of street-st.i.tchery and its monoliths of gla.s.s and of steel and its people wise and ignorant. And there, in that place, invisible and powerful, Alek cast the t.i.tan of force deep into s.p.a.ce where it would spin and soar and g ather momentum for all eternity-- --and he crashed, exhausted, gasping, to his knees. He brought his hands down very slowly, breath hitching, dying in a long hiss of release. Relief.

The new emptiness in the alley felt vast. Christ, what a mess they'd made of it.

Alek pushed himself up using his sword as leverage, He staggered forward unevenly, with all the careful precision of the chronically ill. He was spent. Sick. He headed toward the kneeling figure of his acolyte just ahead.

The whelp moaned, sick as a dog, sick as h.e.l.l itself.

Alek smiled. Good.

Sean fell forward and Alek caught him.

Teresa waited until the two slayers were long gone before emerging into the bluish neon moonlight pouring in through the shattered clerestory window of the abandoned tenement building she called home. Behind her, the light cast the fallen beams into suggestive crossbones relief. She walked to the edge of the open ledge, her shadow sweeping, ravenlike, along the cluttered floor to meet her like an attentive retinue. She looked down.

The alley stank of cardboard and standing water and the aftereffects of the war--wet steel, shed blood.

Death. Death most of all. Teresa did not enjoy the smell, not now, when it emanated from the dead body of the unbound female. Already the flesh and bones had begun to decay, she was so old.

Teresa studied the remnants: black leather jacket and white chemise gown, alluring, ancient, intriguing. But it was what the johns the vampire had fed on had seen in her eyes. Survival of the fittest. Adaptation. The coveted philosophies of the Ancients and the modern Darwin. The female had been only a girlish thing, like Teresa herself, but not really. Too old. An antique doll, centuries old and beautifully preserved.

But not now. Not now. Free now.

In too many ways, Teresa was bitterly jealous.

She was dressed still in the garb of the evening before, the dusty leather mini, the jacket with its bloodstained chains. But as though she wore a gown of white and gold, she brushed her fall of ragged long black hair off her shoulders and studied the toothy sliver of the moon overhead. Not full as it ought to be, not full as it had been the night Paris died.

She blinked. She remembered last night trying not to look at the man on the bed at the Marriott, his lifeless body shiny and as ephemeral as snow in the moonlight, the telltale track of her teeth from his crotch to the gaping black hole in his throat. As she had removed the cash from his wallet on the bureau--three or four hundred dollars at a quick count--she had felt a curious pang she could identify only as guilt. But it was a pa.s.sing thing. It was their way, hers and others, their purpose, their divine will to embrace the cannon of the predator and swallow the weak-minded and the faltering. It was a drama as old as time and the earth.

She'd stuffed the money into her jacket and took his watch as well. She thought she would be able to p.a.w.n it at the shop on Jerome for maybe forty or fifty dollars, and every little bit helped her survive here to finish the mission. The wedding band he wore she crushed in her fist and slung into a dark corner. Some things no one deserved to own.

Teresa shifted and the chemicalized city wind shifted with her as she considered the war so recently waged.

Survival. War among predators. It was a drama played well in the hearts of the two slayers, the dark one so like a stony embodiment of Hades and the sickly colorless one with the madness and the taint of early death in his blood. Their souls were clear as colored gla.s.s to her. The pale one had a spirit as inky as tar. The dark one was red. Red with crimson lines of fire at his fingertips and behind his eyes.

So like...Paris.

Teresa closed her eyes, and in her ragged memory her Paris turned over an iron knife with a papal-cross hilt of black onyx. She felt its weight in her hand, almost expecte d it to be there for her to hold. She heard her Paris's words, his plea, and she nodded. She remembered the undying love of his lips, his hands, upon her. She remembered her vow. The promise she had made, and the tall icy soul all in black and white and crimson with the face of his murdered sister: these two things were her destinies, then. Finally. After so many years, it was all beginning to come together. Opening her eyes, she searched for the moon among the black clouds and between the tall stone monoliths, yet the crimson lines of power were impressed on her eyes forever, like the veins of the sun at dusk.

7.

The dolphins blazed blade-grey in color, sleek and cold, like perfect little silver crescent moons. There were two of them poised over the curling green waves of the ocean. The window was more of a seascape than anything else, a frozen mosaic of painted gla.s.s shards puzzled together by the same long fingers of the Puritan who had cleaved the bedrock under the house and set his mark in stone forevermore. No place did the window claim, and no time; like all true art it made no excuse for itself.

Through the grey dawn gloom Alek watched the dolphins come alive. He lay perfectly still and waited for the window to fill with light like water in a gla.s.s pitcher. And it was only then, when it was finished, beautifully illuminated, that he moved a hand out over the pattern of the old eiderdown quilt under his fingers. This morning it felt almost unfamiliar.

No, not unfamiliar. Only lately unvisited.

It had been so long since he'd lain here in his cell and felt the comfort of a handsewn coverlet around him, a long time since he'd awakened to the sight of the dolphins growing brighter and bluer as the eastern light trickled through the cut panes of gla.s.s. It had been a long time, too long, since he'd spent the night beneath the protective wings of Amadeus House.

A kiss of sapphire sun touched his cheek and he felt strangely animated. He pushed himself up, propping his head against the headboard of the bed as he resettled himself. The old horsehair mattress shifted lightly under a weight it knew too well. And gradually, as he watched, his cell grew to silver, silent life all around him, the dust, the fabrics, the cherrywood finishes rubbed to raw bone. Cells. The bedrooms of the Covenhouse were called cells. Amadeus's designation for them, and it would sound ridiculous in any mouth but his. The cells were simplicity itself: a rustic iron framed bed, thick lion-pawed table and a chair, working gaslight, fireplace, armoire and bookshelves. That was all. The walls were eggsh.e.l.l alabaster and unadorned; the window was art and it was enough.

Sometime in the night while he had slept a fire had been lit in the hearth. It was gone to white, sweet-smelling cedar ash now behind the iron guard. About a dozen years ago he and Book had installed working electricity and central heating in the old mansion. Still, the Father's habits died hard--if, that was, they ever died at all.

Alek settled back and lazily half-closed his eyes, trying hard to recall the peace of this place, his childhood home, this gentle abeyance away from his human life. He frowned as it escaped him. He didn't feel well, not at all. His stomach roiled emptily and there was a sour, singed taste in the back of his throat. He was forced to swallow hard against a returning wave of nausea.

An overuse of psi could do that.

Or else it was just Sean making him violently ill.

Sean. If there was any justice in all the world he would be busy hurling his brains out in the nauseous throes of an overextended psi for the next three days. Yes, that would be perfect. That would be justice.

The night before, when Alek had carried his burden into the house, the whelp had been unconscious and his body had felt like a slack ma.s.s of rubber in Alek's arms. His loony, Machiavellian eyes had been closed then, making him seem absurdly angelic. Deceptively innocent.

So sad that he could not feel tenderness for such a face, he'd thought at the time. Such a tragedy that such beauty must be trapped inside with such an ugly soul. But Alek had dropped the tragedy down onto his bed without ceremony, then turned away and vomited in a corner of Sean's room while the arms of the Father magically appeared and held his head.

"Ah no, what is it he has done to you, beloved?" Amadeus whispered as he wiped the sweat from Alek's brow. When the sickness pa.s.sed and he was able to stand, Amadeus put his palm to Alek's hot cheek for many moments and they spoke in images as only artists can. Then Alek instinctively sought his old cell across the hall and burrowed under the coverlet as if he were still a child afraid of the night.

Amadeus had been there with him, in his mind, speaking the most powerful words. Alek remembered that.

And he'd dreamt. He remembered that too. And in the dream he was trapped in the center of a giant silver web. Unseen spiders tugged the shimmering threads of his web, and with each movement his limbs jerked compulsively like the wooden arms and legs of a marionette. His web had broken finally, the war too great for it, but he'd awakened before he could discover where his fall had taken him.

Alek pulled himself up, weaving still a little, his arms steadying himself against the bedpost as the room slowed, then settled itself down properly. After a while he made himself walk off the nausea like a seasoned drunk might a hangover.

The morning light cast itself in unbroken, dusty banners on the booked western wall and picked out a volume here, there. Alek fingered the volumes as he went along, read the names. Calvin. Paracelsus. Chaucer. Pliny the Elder. Cornelias Agrippa. He pulled down a volume at random and felt its ancient weight in his hands.

Volney's Ruins of Empires. He carried it with him under his chin like a schoolboy and circled the room twice before he stopped in front of the Colonial armoire. He took the armoire's little bra.s.s latch in his thumb and forefinger and gently pulled open the antique double doors. Gabardine habits were folded into dark uniform stacks on the shelves, the skins of a younger Alek Knight still here, as if he'd never grown up and went away from Amadeus House at all. As if a younger Alek Knight would walk in at any moment with his stack of study tomes and put on his gla.s.ses and one of the gowns before tackling the Father's lesson plan for the day.

Some fragile understanding, tenuous as a silk thread, fell in. And all at once he realized what being chosen of Amadeus truly meant. His was the only cell in the vast old house left unchanged, undisturbed, after all this time. Unused. Enshrined. As if Amadeus hadn't a doubt in his ancient mind that Alek would one day return forever.

Covenmaster, he thought.

Covenmaster Alek Knight.

He frowned, shook his head. Absently, he touched the mark on his throat. The wound had healed, yet it stung still.

He looked at the musty stack of habits and wondered if it was possible to slide into those skins of the past, now, almost thirty years later. And looking, his breath hitched softly, then died in a little sigh. His fingers came away from Amadeus's mark and inched into the armoire. Alek put Volney on the table behind him so that he was free to take the impish thing at the back of the armoire in both hands.

Raggedy Andy in his pale little face and faded blue sailor's uniform smiled up at Alek. He'd been Debra's once, a long time ago in a time of strife and confusion. Like the carousel and the cheap little gold ring hanging from the rusted chain around the doll's neck. Debra's. Wicked Debra's. He buried his nose in the red yarny hair, and yes, he could smell her still, feel the stickiness that time and handling had put into Andy's hair by childish fingers.

He slid the ring on the chain off the doll and tucked it into his pocket for no reason at all but that it seemed a good thing to do. Holding the doll still, he looked around the room, feeling all the fragile threads falling into him now, an enormous wed spun in years and distance, heavy with time and surely full of power.

"Coelum non animum mutant, que trans mare current."

The voice was like the gush of wind at his back.

Alek licked his mouth, his teeth. He closed his eyes. "'Those who cross the sea change the sky, not their spirits.' Horace. Epistles. I remember, Father."

"You forget nothing. Unlike so many."

Alek turned slowly, raised his eyes to the Father. "Why don't you simply kill him?"

Inside the casting of the door stood Amadeus like an ancient warrior prince, his face all chiseled ice, his loosened white hair trapped on the rough grain of the alabaster wall in a frosted web. Over his forearm was a Covenmaster's black silk habit. He stroked the length of fabric lovingly, like the hide of a great conquest.

"Kill him. Kill the prophecy," he reasoned. "And would you do this for me, my best child? A single word from me and you would bend the catechism to preserve my life?"

Alek tightened his hold on the doll. "It is not in my power to destroy the boy, but Father, you've lived so long. You could summon the Vatican Council, reason with them--"

"Do you," Amadeus said with complete judgment, "believe I covet my life so that I would try and correct destiny like an Orpheus? Or manipulate my child like a human parent?"

Alek dropped his eyes.

"I would. I should--nein?--for my life is the Coven. But the Coven will live after me. Through you, my son.

You will be the soul of the Coven in my stead. Do you see? My blood lives in you even now. We are wed.

And I will live again after my own death, only it will be another face, another pair of hands and another heart beating, but beating the blood of Amadeus still."

"Immortality."

Amadeus nodded. "Yes, you see. You see best of all. Like a blind man sees."

Alek's mouth twisted against the tears and he tasted them in the back of his throat like bad liqueur.

Immortality. But it was all only a bad joke. Immortality was for G.o.ds, and music, and legend, not the d.a.m.ned. Not for those whose heads could be removed and whose souls cast off the scales into h.e.l.l.

Amadeus smiled. "Memento mori."

Remember that you must die. Ovid? Martialis? Alek couldn't remember. His mind was clotted with grief made all the worse because it could not be roundedly grasped yet for its lack of true presence, of arrival.

"Beloved, we are merely immortal. Not eternal," said the Father. "You too must one day die."

Raggedy Andy fell through Alek's fingers and hit the floor dustily. Of course he would die one day. They would all die. Like Debra had died. Like the thousands they'd slain had died on a thousand other nights and like thousands more still would.

"You doubt," said Amadeus.

"I fear."

"The weight of this--"

"--will crush me."

"Der Unsinn," said Amadeus. "Do you remember the night I found you in the park, holding to your sister, afraid even to speak? You were in my visions long before. As a child I saw you standing at the gateway to the stars in your black hair and bloodied steel. The Chosen. I was led that night to you. Drawn to you.

Drowning in love for you. My journey's end."

Andy smiled up at Alek, demure, a tease who knew all the answers. Alek crossed his arms, almost shuddering. "It's morning," he said and his voice sounded curiously empty to himself, as if like the past and the things in it, coming from a long way's away. But here now. Arrived. "I have to go now, Father. Braxton will be up my a.s.s, my studio's a G.o.dd.a.m.n mess, I--"