"Debra is dead."

"And you are willing to die for her memory. But are you willing to live for her truth?"

"No."

She took his head once more, turned his face up to her own as if he were nothing but a stubborn little boy.

"Do you believe in vampires, Alek Knight?" she demanded.

Her flesh was gla.s.s, her teeth slim little slivers of bone, her hair coa.r.s.e black ribbons that slid compulsively over one-half of her face, making him want to brush it out of her eyes, feel its unnaturalness trickle through his fingers. In her eyes he saw the ages of the earth, truth and fire, darkness and light. Of her whole face, only her mouth seemed truly alive, lips full and dark and as changeable as a snake, mocking, sensual, cruel, forever tempting.

He tried to shrug away and failed.

"Yes," she said. "Yes, well, if you would believe in vampires, then why will you not believe that some small part of our history remains? Our kind must have come from somewhere, some Source. And if that Source were divine rather than demonic...?"

"This is a joke."

Her eyes deepened as if his face had suddenly become her oracle. "'Blessed are they that have not seen, yet have believed.'"

He snarled. He yanked himself away from her evil. "So you've read the Bible. Oh fine. Fine. A vampire's favorite pastime. Tell me, Teresa, where's your rosary? Are you wearing a crucifix under that dress?'

She narrowed her eyes. "I despise crosses, Alek Knight. Symbols, they are, of pain and death and injustice."

He met her look with a malicious smile. "Oh? And what symbol would you have?"

She laughed at him. "Perhaps a dolphin."

He cowered and shivered, his back to the stage. He drew up his knees and clasped them, his forehead rocking forward to rest there like a stone. He sobbed, completely exhausted, as the newest snow began to fall, and it was the weeping of children grown too old.

10.

A hand shook him to waking. "You were calling out, Alek Knight," said the creature beside him. "I thought it best to wake you."

He looked at Teresa's face shading him like the moon, a face made paler still by the halo of deep night clinging to her form. He unwrapped himself and shied away from her featherlike touch on his arm. Let me go, dear G.o.d, please! he wanted to plead, but a wind tainted by the new snow kissed his cheek like a spell and what came out instead as he looked out over the lights of the city was, "I dreamt."

"Yes?"

The words came unbidden, as though of their own volition. "I was in a great hall of some kind, full of the voices that spoke the names of the dead. My coat shone so bright it hurt my eyes. And there were animals in cages so small they could only turn in circles. And pictures...there were these pictures. Portraits, I think. A gallery of them. And they were like Tarot. They were alive. They moved..." His voice trailed away as he listened to the lamenting of the s...o...b..und traffic on Central Park South, the angry vehicles nudging each other like a herd of impatient horses. At the corner a drunk in a watchcap riffled through a basket of trash, oblivious to the snow, hungry... "Go on."

He licked his mouth, remembering. "The Magician watched me; his eyes could turn the land to white ice, could bleed the earth. And there was another...the Queen of Swords, I think. She was red, her hair, her mouth. But her eyes were green. She carried crosswords and she put them through the Magician's heart, and then the animals came from their cages and I..."

He sank into a meditative silence as he lost the thread of memory. Folding his arms atop his knees, he perched his chin on his arms, wondering why he had told her, wondering what in h.e.l.l he was doing here in the park beneath the shadow of the carousel with this thing in the middle of the night. Eustace was dead--he was late for his ascension to Covenmaster, and a murderer--his whole d.a.m.ned life falling apart around him-- He felt her eyes burn on his profile, the chains on her coat singing in the soughing wind. "Don't be shy. Talk to me."

He sighed, caught a sob before it could take ahold of him. It escaped instead in a plume of steamy white air.

He felt utterly hopeless. "What...what do you want to talk about?"

She grasped his arm like a trusting daughter and rested her cheek on his shoulder. Light as a toy. He did not pull away this time. What was the point? "Tell me things. Your Coven," she said, "it is very old."

He nodded.

"Is it true they were the magistrates who hanged the Salem witches?"

"I don't know. The books say nothing--"

"They wouldn't," she said. "We call him the Mad."

"Who?"

"Amadeo. Amadeo the Mad. Asmodeus, if you prefer. The devil with the white eyes. But his eyes are dark."

Debra's words to him, once, a long time ago. When she lived. When they both lived. This creature. She was beautiful and perfect and she terrified him and he stood up and moved away from her, concealing it with a shrug of stiffness.

She smiled at his uneasiness like the devil she was and flicked the end of her braid over her face like a rouge brush. He had a sudden image of himself lying over her in the dark somewhere, bathed in sweat and pa.s.sion, his hair in her face, his teeth in her throat...

Her smile grew coy. Her image then. Her spell.

He tore his eyes away from her and ventured a step. "I can't stay here, I can't--."

"Amadeus."

He moved a ways away from the carousel, to the edge of the bicycle path. At a distance came the m.u.f.fled clopping of horses' hooves on snow-packed gravel. He glanced upward. The trees of the park rose bravely against the cold and a future of industry and gla.s.s and smog. Far off, the city shown like an expensive set of diamonds in black velvet. The Brooklyn Bridge winked like a collapsing web spun by a spider made all of light and glitter. But here, with his back turned toward her, he could not see the face of his tormentor, nor see her evil smile, nor hear her lasciviously whispered thoughts. He c.o.c.ked his head up at a sky pregnant with black ice. "He draws on me."

"Blood calls to blood. But where will you go?"

Where could he go? He was homeless rabble now, like the man at the trash basket, no better, and the reality of it stuck in his gut like a blade. The night would pa.s.s away in only a few short hours and anything that had seemed safe and temporary in the dark, like the lights on the bridge and all the nightsins the city had to offer, would soon be gone with it. He had no real friends to speak of outside the Coven, no one who could understand this thing and not think he was insane. The studio would have been staked out by the Coven by now. And he could never see the dolphins in his bedroom window again--because Amadeus knew, and his blood ran through the Father's veins. They were married still.

Where could he go? Where?

His mouth trembled. "He'll find me."

"Of course he will."

He thought of the suburbs, then Connecticut, then farther north. How far north? He didn't know. Who the f.u.c.k cared? No matter how far he ran it wouldn't be enough. If he went to Iceland it wouldn't be far enough.

"Go away. He'll kill you too. Get as far away from me as you can." He waited, the wind in his coat and a hand in his snow-wet hair, combing it slick across one cold cheek, thinking blankly, wondering what the h.e.l.l he would do. He waited forever, but when he looked back at last she was there still, slender as a bone, doll- like in her simple beauty. She would shatter under the barbarity of his most careful touch, he knew, had he dared to touch her.

"Go away," he whispered, hoa.r.s.e. "It's finished."

She smiled, flashed her ruby eyes at him.

It wasn't fair.

"G.o.d d.a.m.n you," he whispered.

"Walk away from me," she said, "if you can."

She knew magic. Vixen. Sorceress.

It was not fair.

"I can't move," he complained.

"Try."

He went to her. He knelt at her feet. She held the mantle of his head to her breast as if in benediction. "See.

You can."

His tears soaked all her raven hair. "I love you."

"You love Debra."

"I want to die for you. Please don't leave me. I love you."

Her fingers burned his cheeks as he expected they would. Red fire to cleanse and to sanctify. Her mouth was red against his, the lightest branding. She licked the tears from his cheeks and chin and left behind only wetness and warmth and the purity of her touch. She kissed him once more, on the side of the throat, over the pulse, and when she drew back her lips wore the paint of his life. His skin flushed inexorably, as if she had set him to burning.

Then she waited, patient, as if for some portent or some vow.

His trembling hands framed her face. All that perfect black hair, those ebony eyes with their scarlet hearts.

Red. It was all that was missing, all that she needed to make her a G.o.ddess. He kissed her hair, her delicate throat. She sighed and turned her head, offering herself to him now with the same fearless pa.s.sion she had used to steal away his soul. So unfair. So beautiful.

So perfect.

"I want so much to die for you," he whispered into her cold, winterfrost hair.

"But I want so much for you to live for me," she answered.

"I can't move."

The Covencircle raised their eyes.

The Father was seated at the head of the table, head hanging amidst a medusan tangle of white long hair, as still as a stone G.o.d. On the table lay the two katanas Sean had retrieved from the Village alley at the Father's behest some time ago. They'd fallen crossed, absurdly symbolic: Eustace's beneath and Alek's atop.

"I love you," uttered the Father in a drilling monotone.

Sean frowned. He glanced across the table at the others who had shown face tonight: Aristotle. Takara.

Robot. Kansas. Doc Book. Every face was distorted with concern, but only Booker was seated far back in his chair, a keen look of understanding darkening his eyes, his sweat-slicked hands laced together on the table in front of him.

Sean smiled. "Worried about your childhood playmate, are you, bro?"

Booker returned Sean's look. Shut up, a.s.shole, he mouthed.

The Father's voice grew theatrically plaintive. "I want to die for you. Please don't leave me. I love you."

Booker's face pinched in understanding. He nodded to himself.

What? Sean mouthed to him.

Alek, said Booker.

Sean pigged his eyes.

Booker sighed and tapped his temple with one finger. He's inside.

Oh. Righteous, man.

The Father lapsed into a long, contemplative silence after that, and Sean quickly lost interest. He watched the others look broody and lost and turn their rings and twist their hair and shoot all kinds of sidelong "I told you so" looks at one another. And when it all became too much, too boring, too overwhelming to stand it any more--the tension, the silence eating away at the room like an invisible cancer--he chewed his fingers, his eyes roving over the table and his master and the swords.

It was an amazing weapon, Alek's sword. Mirror-blade, white jade handle as carved as a bone.

"I knew he was trouble first time I set eyes on him," Takara whispered. Unlike the others, she sat still enough to rival even the Father. Her black eyes wept light like opals. Her white fist was wrapped tight as rope around the ornate hilt of the wakisashi she favored. She turned the wak in and touched the tip of the blade to her bottom lip. A bead of blood welled up there like a gem. "Even as a boy he had no right to it,"

she said, those eyes of hers set hard on the sword.

Her words brought to Sean's mind a curious picture: some gangly, darkly-maned kid all in black messing around with that sword while all those other lollipop-sweet kids like Wally and the Beave played with marbles and hoola-hoops or whatever the h.e.l.l back in the wild and woolly 1950's. Sean laughed. Jaded from the beginning, jaded to the end. "He ain't no saint. He's just a f.u.c.kin' queer-o fruitcake, man. It was just a matter of time before he went tipped--"

Booker shushed them both.

Takara growled at Book.

Kansas flinched and reached for the imaginary brim of the hat he no longer wore.

Silent Robot only stared. Eerie.

"I want so much to die for you."

They all glanced up in time to see the Father's face shatter. "To die..." His hands shot out, knocking the swords clanking to the floor; then, with automatic precision, they spidered up to his face, those hands, covered his stupid, useless eyes, his fingers curling into talons in the soft pockets of flesh. The Father uttered a low keening noise to which every pore of the body opened itself to, his cry catching in every corner of the Great Abbey, quaking it to its bedrock and beyond.

Booker's dark face paled to sick grey and his knuckles showed white where his fingers gripped the edge of the table. Aristotle and Kansas whimpered and hid under the table together. Takara stiffened. Even Robot, usually as unmoveable as a corpse, as unshakable as the manmade, soulless creation which had given him his nickname, blanched and managed to go another shade paler, if that was possible.

Sean cowered in his seat, nearly overturning the chair once more, as the blood ran freely down their Covenmaster's face and tainted the swords at his feet.

The water of The Pond was black as oil and the swan at its center blacker still, black, black as the winter sky full of unbroken ice. He was the only one of his flock left and he turned in slow, precise circles to keep the water from freezing beneath him. It reminded Alek of a book he'd once read as a young child. He could not remember the t.i.tle now but he did remember the story: the prince of swans was heir to the Pond, but the city wanted to fill the pond up and build on it and then the waterbirds would have nowhere to raise their children.

But the prince, being clever, had a plan. At autumn's end when his people flew to warmer places, he stayed behind and entertained the park's children with his clever antics. The artists and the TV people came from miles around to see him, and it was they who preserved the pond far the Prince and his people and their children and children's children. But then one midwinter's night the pond began to freeze, and he turned and turned to save himself, but the ice caught him up in the end as it must and by morning he was finished.

At the water's edge, standing on the bicycle path running alongside Central Park South, Alek tossed the Prince bits of sweetroll he'd purchased at a vender's kiosk on the avenue--the only food he could afford now with five dollars in his pocket and a cash card whose PIN number wouldn't work anymore. The swan did not notice the offering, however; he was too busy trying to live.

He would be gone by morning. The creed of the martyr: The heroes must always sacrifice themselves.