Alek bowed his head over his work and did not answer, shutting out the b.i.t.c.h's glancing smile and her gaze.

It was Debra's eyes that flashed up, dark and mirrored and full of some black token of warning. Probably she was thinking about getting back at Ms. Bessell for the confinement thing by putting earthworms in her shoes or something. He saw dirt in Debra's mind, and squirming living things crawling across an expanse of bluish white flesh. He shook his head and frowned. And when, finally, he felt brave enough to join her look, he saw that the b.i.t.c.h was gone.

Debra smiled sincerely, took his hand, squeezed his fingers. The sensation made him wince, made him almost see the worms and the naked earth in her eyes.

Ms. Bessell did not court Debra Knight's gaze after that. She seemed almost afraid of Debra, and for that Alek was grateful and stayed close to her because she was everything to him and she kept him safe with her words and her definite little touches. And because he was certain that as long as they were together and could speak and dream and touch and laugh about the funny names Cook made up for the b.i.t.c.h everything would always be all right.

Later that same week it happened for the first time.

Alek was dressing in the boy's locker room when he thought he heard a gentle whistling rebounding on the dragon-green tiles of the shower walls. He froze solidly in the midst of b.u.t.toning up his shirt. He caught his breath and held it tight within himself like a secret until the whistling receded.

Then it returned. Louder. Larger.

He looked around, realized he was completely alone, for the other boys had finished showering and gone out to the playground or down into the gameroom the way he usually let them before emerging from behind the thick white curtain of steam and water. Once, one of the older boys had laughed at him and asked him if he planned on joining a carnival as a Living Skeleton, and since that time he never let the others see his body. Now he hated that boy bitterly. He wished Debra was near, but Debra was a girl and couldn't be here. Still, he whispered her name for comfort and because the sound of it always made him feel clever. He thought about what she would do in this situation--probably rush right out into the aisle and start chanting one of the funny little ditties Cook had taught her--and did just the opposite and retreated into a narrow niche between two lockers, hoping the b.i.t.c.h would pa.s.s by with her melodious whistling and her notebook and too-wise smile without noticing him. Alek closed his eyes, did not feel or think or breathe. And waited.

Footsteps. Whistling, long and musical. Strains of Bing Crosby Then nothing.

Alek opened his eyes.

And there was the b.i.t.c.h looking down on him with small studious eyes. Her frame filled the slight opening of the tiny niche to overflowing. So much so, that for a moment Alek was certain her white flesh--fishlike pale and unmarked and unpretty when he thought to compare it to Debra's cold smooth tautness--would began to seep like Silly Putty around the edges of the lockers and drown him in all its smothery softness like the Blob or something. He thought about what Debra had said about Thriller Theatre, and looking on Ms. Bessell, he saw her the same way suddenly--as something white and dead and as desperate as one of the monsters on television. Her lips were painted overly dark for her face, like someone who had eaten too much preserves, but between those lips her jumbled teeth were as yellow and mottled as the skin of an overripe banana. The fluorescent lights had made her eyes reflective so they shone like the milky, cataract-filled eyes of a dead woman, a victim of the monster.

"h.e.l.lo there," the b.i.t.c.h said as if they were meeting for the first time. She tipped her head and the backlighting threw her shadow like a cold old blanket over his face. "Alek...Alek." Bessell tapped her notebook meditatively. "Did you know your name means 'savior of mankind'? No, you didn't know that, did you? Of course not. Now you do."

Alek said nothing.

Ms. Bessell smiled. She said, "I brought you something," and reached into the side-slit pocket of her dress and offered him the chunky magical wand of a Clark Bar.

Alek wanted to tell the b.i.t.c.h to go to h.e.l.l, the way Cook always did, but he couldn't seem to find his voice.

Something had eaten it all up.

But Ms. Bessell was a patient woman and held the Clark Bar out to him to take for some time. "Please, Alek. I want to be your friend. I want you to have this. I promise I won't tell anyone. It'll be our little secret." But when he did nothing after many long wordless moments Ms. Bessell pocketed the sweet. "No?"

she said with a sweet long smile. "No: I guess that doesn't interest you, does it? What does interest you, hmm?"

Alek watched in dawning horror as the b.i.t.c.h reached into her opposite pocket and produced suddenly a small flashing blue sliver of a razor. No! A part of him wanted to whimper and beg. No no no! And yet there it was, the razor as bright as a cleaver under the harsh glare of the light. Move! he told himself, but his body was fastened into place, his eyes stuck unblinking on the shiver and spin of light on the piece of stainless steel.

Ms. Bessell smiled and pressed the metal to the tip of her left pointer finger until the white skin there gave to crimson. Then the dry white hand went out to his face. He turned away, pressed his spine to the back wall and tried to make himself small, but he couldn't escape the b.i.t.c.h's finger at his mouth, tracing an invisible pattern over his lips, wetting them with the warmth and ironstink of her substance, lingering on the hard ridges of his eyeteeth. He shut his eyes tight, his mouth tighter; he could hear the other children shouting and laughing down in McEnroy's belly and just beyond it on the playground, so near and yet so hopelessly far away, and all of it m.u.f.fled by the strangling, rhythmic rasping of the b.i.t.c.h's breath on his cheek.

For a long time they simply remained that way, like two inappropriate statues hooked together.

And then, abruptly, the b.i.t.c.h turned and began to walk away, whistling her incessant, stupid songs.

Alek wiped the foreign substance on his sleeve, waited a moment until the whistling had vanished from the halls completely, then ran. That night Debra cried for him. Alek turned over in the bed they shared and held her, her bones birdlike and fragile, a familiar mystery of construct, her hair tangling and lost irretrievably with his own, afraid, but trusting his fear to no one but her, because his fear had no name and they were together, but together they were utterly alone. And together and alone they comforted each other and held to each other as if they would lose themselves if they let go even a moment. So they spoke and wept softly and between the shelters of their tangled hair, Alek let his special teeth graze his lower lip until he felt the first stirrings of sweetness there and then offered his sister the kiss that was both a pledge and a promise. Her lips were cold and she suckled eagerly at his mouth because it was what comforted her and what they had always done when they grew too lonely and afraid and hungry for something they did not know what. And then, only when her lips were stained crimson, was she able to sleep.

Alek kissed her once more, but softly this time. And he tasted her, tasted them, and the single creature they were in their minds and hearts, a creature so hopelessly different from every other creature here that he sometimes wondered what it was they should be called, what its name was, if he dared ask.

Mates, he thought, his hand at her bleak, icy profile. We are mates. At six years of age the concept was almost too distant for Alek to fully understand, yet he knew it to be the only real truth.

When the twins were seven years of age, couples began to take notice of them. Debra, particularly, because in her alabaster face she seemed like a pretty china doll that should be arranged on a bedspread or carefully preserved behind plates of dusty gla.s.s.

The first time she was to be fostered out she stormed back and forth across their room in her white slip, the lines of the fabric mere delineation's on her ghostlike body, her arms crossed and hair trailing after her like a black silk cloak. "I won't go," she stated, not bothering with the speaking, wanting now the gruff pleasure of speech. "I won't, Alek. They can't make me!"

He saw the b.i.t.c.h grinning in Debra's mind and heard a distant echo of whistling and he nearly shuddered, held it back to be strong.

"They can't make me leave," she hissed. "They can go to h.e.l.l. All of them."

Alek turned away from the sight of her graceful, pacing rage and studied the box of her things on their bed, the shimmery dark clothes, her sketches of unicorns and the moon and his Raggedy Andy doll he was giving her because she'd lost her Raggedy Anne in Central Park during a school outing. He looked aside, ashamed, because he wanted to weep and he knew he shouldn't, that he was a boy and he should be strong for them both, the way boys always were on TV. "You have to, Debra. They say--"

"G.o.dd.a.m.n them." She smiled, her hair blizzarding around her savage little face, and he was shocked to hear her say those words and to say them with such power and ease. "I hate them," she whispered, hoa.r.s.e with grief, "all of them." She began to sob, and he rose and went to her, embraced her carefully, her face sinking into the cradle between his neck and shoulder like two pieces that fit exactly.

Don't cry, Debra, he told her. It'll be all right, I promise. I'll be right here.

But you won't be with me. We won't be together.

He thought about her words, then pressed her back, inspired. >From under their bed where he kept his best treasures--a model of The Spirit of St. Louis made of popsicle sticks, the sockful of marbles he always beat Bobby Watson with at Dead Man's Square an the playground, his banned copy of Catcher in the Rye that Cook had given them, an issue of Popular Mechanics all about the Sputnik--and dug out the ring he'd found in a gutter in the street near the Fountain Avenue Dump a couple of months ago. Bobby insisted it was some cast-off junk, but Alek liked to believe it was far more valuable than that.

"Your ring?"

"Our ring," he said because he felt clever the way he did sometimes when he looked at a Pica.s.so picture and could see different stories inside it and make up all his own on paper just from that one look. He turned the ring over; it felt heavy and warm and powerful in his hand. "It's magic. When you look into it, you'll see me."

"That's stupid."

"Is not. Look how it shines, look how it holds my image."

And it did shine in the dim light of the reading lamp on their bedside table; it shone like a magic talisman in the stories they liked to read by Tolkien and others with their faraway lands and talking swords and beautiful dragons. And in the ring he studied was his own face, as plain as day. "Why is it magic, huh?"

"Well...because something is, you know, if you want it to be. And we're lucky. We're magic. Everyone says so."

The tears were on her cheeks like splashed gems. "Do you love me?"

"You know I do. I'll always love you." He cupped her face and kissed her, razed his tongue along her teeth so she could taste him and take comfort.

"Debra Knight."

Her precious name sounded so unmusical coming through the harsh gravelly voice of their social worker standing in the door. And behind his impatient, chain-smoking figure were Debra's new foster parents, the McKinneys, a pair of middle-cla.s.s white picket people with bovine faces and sympathetic eyes staring at them as if they were two poor Little Orphan Annies. Mrs. McKinney wore her trussed hair under a boxlike hat and Mr. McKinney was dressed in wool slacks and a dull yellow cardigan. They moved almost in sync and looked eerily like mechanical replicas of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson.

Alek narrowed his eyes on them and touched his sister's face once, twice. She caught his hand, kissed it. My beloved, she told him, the words as soft and insinuating as a caress to his senses.

"Come along, Debbie dear," said the grinning Harriet replica.

"Debra," she said. b.i.t.c.h. Her fist swallowed up his gift as she turned to her twin and smiled darkly and told him silently, like a promise, that she'd soon be back, soon, and all he must do is wait. Then she gathered up her box of belongings and followed the social worker out.

Alek did not sleep that night, waking again and again. Afraid. Alone in his enormous bed. He listened to the raspy breathing of the new boy occupying the bed in the opposite corner, hating him. Hating everyone. He closed his eyes and brushed Debra's mind with his own, felt her wake gratefully from her own fitful sleep in a room painted in bright blushing pinks that was all wrong for her in a home set snug and safe behind a whitewashed fence in some upstate suburban town. He put his hand up on the wall over his bed, knowing she was doing the same thing.

I want to fly away, Alek, she said.

So did he.

And then suddenly they were high above the city where the lights shivered and millions of voices whispered, and without ever having left their beds. It was magic, and so easy. It was how the twins learned they could fly. They linked hands and pa.s.sed invisibly over sharp, lighted pinnacles, the thrill of vertigo tightening their hearts and throats and taking all the pain out of them because they were together now, in the only way they knew how, the only way left to them.

And when Debra dropped in a sudden burst of laughter, Alek followed her to see what had entranced her so.

She spiraled down and drifted ghostlike over a great wheel encrusted with hundreds of dark eyes. She dipped lower and then she was beneath the wheeled roof, slipping through a menagerie of painted wooden animals impaled on candy-striped poles, dancing through the strange forest before settling at last with a kind of sigh on the proud arch of the dolphin's back.

Alek watched her from a shy distance, envious, almost afraid of her because she was so brave, and loving her because she was absolutely everything, the beginning and the end, his life and blood and desire made real. His balance.

Afterward, Deb r a returned to him and carried him up over the carousel, and their innocent lovemaking was a dream of fluttery touches and gentle, searching kisses that left him breathless and so hungry.

They visited the carousel in Central Park often after that first night, always with Alek drifting at its edge to watch his twin stroke the silvery body of the dolphin and swim at its side like a sea maiden, her hair ribboning behind her and her eyes the color of molten earth. But then the dawn would come, inevitably, and the dream would end and they would awaken separated, Debra in her doll house bedroom fixed by big children playing pretend and Alek in his sterile cage where he could hear whistling walk the halls of McEnroy Home in the early morning like a malevolent spirit waiting on the full moon and the bloodsport attendant thereon.

Less than a month pa.s.sed before Debra Knight was returned to McEnroy Home. The mealy-faced McKinneys were reluctant to elaborate on their reasons except to say that their childless union wasn't quite the torment it once was.

Debra laughed that night as she turned full circle in their room, her bloodred camisole spinning like the scarlet wings of an exotic bird around her legs. Alek embraced her the moment she stopped and she kissed him and nipped at his ear in playful greeting.

"How did you do it?"

Debra laughed once more. "Oh so easy, my beloved," she said, casting back her head in delight, shaking out her hair. "I used the Method, of course."

The Method. The old technique just about every kid at McEnroy had used to dissuade a stupid pair of foster parents from adopting you: break a few china plates, clog the pipes, act crazy or just downright rude. But it was more than that: Alek recognized that immediately. No foster family sent you back this fast, no matter how badly you wrecked their house. And he was certain to remind her of that fact.

Debra laughed anew, full of the glee of revenge. "I took their little bird and cooked it. It was absolutely delicious. Mrs. McKinney's expression, that is."

He drew back. He felt pale, a little sick.

But then she looked at him and kissed him again and it was like in all the stories, but with the spell being made and not broken with that kiss, and Alek's love for her was too great for his revulsion and, finally, he kissed her back. But now her mouth was different, her eyes deeper, a shade wilder, and Alek felt he held some strange savage G.o.ddess in his arms. What had she learned the last few weeks? How was she so different?

He tried to search her mind but she shrugged teasingly away from him, both physically and mentally, and he was mystified when she climbed into the open bedroom window where the summer nightwind turned her gown to flames and her hair to a living cloak of sapphire darkness and smiled invitingly and put out her hand to him.

"Fly with me, Alek, pleeeease?" she pleaded.

Out there? In their physical forms?

"Debra, we can't!"

"Why?"

"What do you mean why? We can't! We just can't! It'd make the grownups angry."

"Who cares if the grownups are angry?"

And he opened his mouth to argue, but there was no real argument inside of him, only fear, small and gnawing like a little mouse, and he was embarra.s.sed by it..

"In case you haven't noticed, there is a world out there, Alek," Debra told him. "And I want you to play with me in it! Right now!"

And so he put his hand in his twin's as he must, and they played in the dark with their shiny eyes that night as they would many nights afterward, hide-and-seek and tag and some strange game Debra had learned where you waited until an animal or insect was inches from your absolutely still hand, probing or sniffing it, and you could catch it so quickly it hadn't even a chance to panic.

But with that game and time the wildlife around the Home became boring and Debra guided him to the rabbit holes in Central and Battery Park and to the tenement backlots where skeletonized strays burrowed deep into Dumpsters. And she'd learned where the pigeons were and where to find the pond geese by night and the method of catching them and soothing them to silence with her touch and her whispers. At least until the night her little captured rabbit died of fright. Debra cut it open in curiosity and studied its strange and beautiful and jewel-like little organs, the jellylike shine of its secrets.

"Do you see?" she said, pointing out its tiny, muscular heart. "Without this its blood wouldn't move. It's like a machine, Alek, a pretty machine." Then she smiled. And quite unexpectedly, she pressed the naked little beast to her twin's lips as if it was a Communion chalice and watched, pleasantly amused, as Alek writhed away from it with a mixture of revulsion and curiosity. She laughed at him, put her finger in the crimson pool and painted his mouth red. And this time when the chalice was pa.s.sed he did not balk but sipped carefully from the vessel of life, raw and delicate and hitter and wild.

It was a curious thing, not unnatural, exactly, only...unfamiliar. Animals were meant to be eaten anyway.

"I thought it tasted like pepper and flowers," Debra told him afterward.

"What are we?" be asked her in response as they lay down together in bed that night, for though his belly was swollen and warm with their repast, his intellect demanded to be fed as well.

Her mind laughed at him and she called him a poor, miserable philosopher. She turned over and kissed him all over, making him laugh and squirm with the sensation. Finally, when her cold delicate little lips found the thicket scratch on his cheek he felt her stop, sip, drink the blood gently off his shallow wound as if she hadn't had enough with the rabbit, would never be filled. You know the word, she laughed.

He thought of the movies they'd seen, the sto ries in the comic hooks. Vampires.

Eww, no, she said. DemiG.o.ds, she said because she'd learned the word somewhere and it meant something like an angel.

After that it became the routine of their lives. The couples who were comfortable with their safe, beautiful lives habitually fell in love with and wanted the china doll beauty of McEnroy Home to compliment their pristine ivory houses. At least until she produced the red shade of death in their household, when she was dutifully returned to the Home and to Alek.

Still, the twins were together every night, even in their brief separations, because they could fly. And fly they did, over the city and through it, sometimes as ghosts and sometimes as demiG.o.ds, but always as mates, and with nothing to mar their dark, perfect happiness but the smiling nightmare of Ms. Bessell and the whistling.

9.

The girl was not Debra.

Why had he thought she was? A trick of the light, perhaps, or the fantasy of her doll-like, sensuous face floating before him, her breath on his throat. Those great dark eyes. But she was not Debra. And Alek understood with all the violence of an epiphany that he was about to die by Debra's doppleganger. Die. Slain by a creature with the body of an angel and the eyes of a lilith, and yet he could not move, could not rise, could not flee or start or cry out even as the creature placed her delicate long bony hands to either side of his head and tipped his face up, her makeupless old eyes boring black holes through his skull and far back into the most intimate chambers of his mind and memories.

So easy for her she was so old and talented: The Home. Debra. The b.i.t.c.h. The tears. Fear. Alone. Debra.

The McKinneys. Debra. Blood. Kisses. The Sheridans and the Forsythes and the Strakers. Blood, more blood, the will of Debra. Debra and the rabbit, the dead rabbit. Blood. The Coven. More blood, more.

Madness. Debra, Debra, Debra...

He jerked once near the end, stiffened like a corpse in the girl's hands. No. Please, dear G.o.d please, I don't, I can't-- He fell away from her emptily and hit the ground at her feet, face to the broken asphalt, prostrate before her because he neither had the strength nor the will to rise. She'd taken it all and he was bereft. He wanted to destroy her--needed to, if only to kill what she'd learned about him--but he would never pick up that sword again. Not now, not now--not when all its tragedies had been revealed to her.

Instead, he remained as he was, cheek numbing against the ground, his eyes open but seeing it all blindly, without purpose or control. All of it. Compulsively. From the beginning to the end like a horror movie played in fast forward. The blood. Bessell. Debra. Amadeus. The carousel. Debra. Debra. He wept. He didn't care now if the vampire reached for him in hate or in hunger and soiled the floor of the city with his blood. It was all right. It would at least be closure, the edges of his thwarted fate coming together.

He would be with Debra once more-- "Mister Alek? My laws, Mister Alek!"

His eyes swept open, his head angling toward the voice, letting it drag him back to the present. The alley, already tight, stony black with graffiti and night, seemed to shrink further down around the wide, boyish bulk of the figure standing over him with such concern. Eustace. d.a.m.ned fool. Why couldn't the whelp just let him be? Why couldn't he just let his elder die in peace?

Eustace tugged annoyingly at his arm. "Mister Alek, are you hurt, sir?"

Yes. "Talk to me, Mister Alek!"

No. Leave me alone.