Slayer - Death Becomes Him Part 15

The blood was astonis.h.i.+ng. It painted the walls of their white room like a picture of abstract poinsettias. It painted Alek and it painted his twin in its cloying, metallic sweetness. It did not seem possible a single person could have so much blood in them. Debra laughed playfully and put her tongue to the gush of warmth like Alek had seen other children put their tongues to water fountains in the park. Debra drank in greedy, starving gulps, and when she looked up at him, her face was red out of which glowed only the feral blackness of her eyes, eyes shot through with sad, heckling laughter and the madness of her life.

Debra licked her lips clean and Alek felt his paralysis break. He felt himself sink inside at the sight, almost blacken out. And knowing now, knowing why they'd been left on the doorstep of the Home eight years ago by a nameless, faceless individual who had obviously seen the shadows behind their eyes, but who had not had the heart for proper murder. Knowing now, knowing the name given to her, to them, to their race, and knowing it was not demiG.o.d, was not G.o.d of any kind at all. Knowing everything now with the shock of instinct, knowing and sick now with the completion of that knowledge. And it wasn't like in the stories and the movies, not at all. There was no beauty in death, no glory. It was all red and torn and b.l.o.o.d.y and foul.

Debra smiled invitingly at him, red lips drawing away from hard ivory teeth, a pulpy shred of the b.i.t.c.h's flesh caught in the corner of her mouth, the mouth he always kissed. And he saw, nearly like an afterthought, that the ring had swung free around her neck and that she had his Andy doll clutched tight by one arm, and these human affectations only seemed to make the horror of her utterly real to him. So when she kissed him with her murderous mouth, then tried to draw his face down to the new chalice she offered, he balked and thrashed away from her, from the horror that was her, from the searing, murderous taste of a dead woman on her lips. He got to his feet and raced to the other side of the room and crouched in the moonlight.

And yet still she came at him, eyes curious as a cat's, words seeking him, touch questing. And at last, with his back against the wall, with nowhere else to go, he snapped and made a pained sound of horror in his throat and struck her across the face. Debra went down. It was not a harsh blow, but it had harmed her in a way no blow could because it came from him.

"Aaalek," she whined plaintively, touching her face where a spayed red mark, almost as red as blood, was taking hold.

He glanced sideways at the remains of the b.i.t.c.h, hating her all the more for doing this to Debra. To them both. He shuddered uncontrollably like someone with a fatal fever, trying to forget all those lessons in Sunday School, all those meandering scriptures with their hidden and d.a.m.ning meanings, but unable to, for the wages of sin were death, right? And death--murder--was the worse sin in the world anyone could ever do. He found one of their yellowing backissues of Weird Tales lying on the floor beside their bed and picked it up. Then he rounded on her, breathing hard but inspired. "Is this what you want, Debra?" he ranted at her, he supposed like a madman. "To be this? Is that what you want? Do you want to be d.a.m.ned?"

"Beloved..." She rose unsteadily and looked at him with her subhuman eyes. Her voice was old, confused suddenly, the voice of some G.o.ddess exhumed from her grave of a thousand years. She looked at the mess of their room that she had made as if she could not understand his rage. "She--it's the blood of our enemy!"

"You murdered her, Debra!"

"She doesn't count."

She was closing the black box down on him, sealing the canvas over his face like a burial shroud, because she believed his will was her own and her word the truth, but if she was going to willingly embrace d.a.m.nation and be a monster like in the movies then she would be doing it alone, without him.

He began to weep, but dryly. "You do what you want, but don't you dare ask me to go into this thing with you! Don't you dare!" He threw the magazine at her with its ghoulish, cruel-eyed cover. "I won't do it! I don't care who you are, I won't! I hate you! I hate you to h.e.l.l!"

Like a somnambulist her arms went out to him. A child waking from a nightmare or only waking to a new one. She looked at him without understanding. She seemed to fall at his words.

But then he caught her, pulling her out of the nightmare, to him, to the shelter of his body. She sobbed, shuddering, her mouth wet and miserable against his skin; she stained his clothes dark with her tears.

"You said you'd l ove me forever," she said.

His anger and horror were gone. His Debra was crying and tearing his heart to pieces. He made soothing noises to calm her, stroked her hair, rocking her gently in his embrace as her mind sought the cloister of his own. He sobbed with her, loving her and despising her, repulsed and enchanted by her, feeling so close to her now and yet so very hopelessly far away.

And after many moments it all seemed to end, not the horror of what she--they--had done, but the shock of it. He suddenly found himself capable of thought and words. "We have to go away now," he decided. "Far away before they find out." And she nodded at his words and let him gather her up, cradling her thin, tired little body easily in his arms.

He took her to the bed and dressed her in warm clean clothes and wiped the blood off her face, and then he changed himself and gathered together a few simple but important things. Their pictures. His Andy doll. Once finished, they padded silent and shoeless from the room that had once caged them, been their home. They went down the vacant corridor, down the flight of backstairs that connected the dorms with the butler's pantry at the rear of the Home, and there they put on their boots and coats and prepared to go out into the wintry darkness of the city.

They met no one on the way, and just as well: Alek was certain he would have commanded anyone to stay back as they left the Home by the door through which they had entered it. And he was equally certain anyone he commanded to do so would have obeyed him without question.

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

The coa.r.s.e white voice came to him out of the darkness and the dull, weary winter dawn, and Alek's breath caught at the sound as if on a thorn. He untangled himself from his twin and looked around searchingly.

Behind them the white wooden horse gently moved on its revolver, clicking forward three paces, then falling back as the wind and snow buffeted it. And Debra, clasped to him where they huddled under the canopy, hoping to wait out the storm, comforted at last to sleep by his words and this place, moaned lightly.

"Horace," said the voice. "Epistles. A favorite of mine."

Holding her tightly, Alek narrowed his eyes and was at last able to pick out the figure standing on the gravel path not a dozen feet from them. The invader had gotten there, but how? He'd thought they were alone here, and he was certain, with his newfound senses, that he would detect even a drunkard's feeble staggering. And yet a strange man stood here now with a hand resting on the ebony war-horse, his robes so black it--and most of the rest of him--disappeared into the night and made his white face and hands swim ghostlike and disembodied in the dark.

No, he was mistaken, he saw: it was not robes that the man wore but a long black habit and black topcoat, like something a priest might wear.

Alek cradled his sister's head protectively to his heart. "Are you a priest, sir?"

It was all he could think to say. There were priests at the Home who held Ma.s.s and regular Sunday School cla.s.ses every week. He knew what a priest looked like and what a priest was and what a priest did. You told a priest your evils. And priests hated vampires, he knew that too.

The man who looked like a priest smiled with scarcely any change of expression. "In fact, der Kleine, a priest I am. But you mustn't fear. Vampire? You are much more, child. And much less."

Alek didn't know what to say to that or what the priest even meant. "Those words you spoke," he said, "are they Latin?"

One eyebrow arched and the priest's smile grew. "Bright boy."

"What do they mean, sir?"

The priest stepped forward, and as he pa.s.sed beyond the shadows the last of the midwinter's moon took and became his hair. It was a mane that fell to his waist, and it was as white as a hundred alien suns, as white as a twilight blizzard. He was too impossible to be real, too ephemeral to exist for very long, and yet he did.

Some huge power existed within him that he seemed scarcely able to contain, a power so large it dwelled about him almost like a retinue.

"They mean," he said as he swayed forward and Alek saw at last the vanis.h.i.+ng pale of this man's eyes, "that you have come home, Alek Knight." The priest touched his face and it was like the cool holy burning of ash.

Alek s.h.i.+vered. "How...do you know who I am?"

The priest laughed. "Ah, but now, little knight, I can't be telling you all. A magician never reveals his secrets, does he?"

Debra stirred in his arms. "Alek," she moaned, "what's happening?"

"It's all right." He kissed her hair. "He's a friend." He looked up at the priest. "He's...he's like us, I think."

Debra sat up and sought out the stranger's eyes. And almost at once Alek felt the icy rime of her distrust and heard her stony voice in his mind which said there was no room in their world but for him and her. She turned her face into him. I want to go away, Alek. Take us far away.

We have nowhere to go, Debra.

Come with me, children, said the priest in their private language, and go with your own kind. And go into the open, waiting arms of the Coven.

Alek narrowed his eyes. "The Coven?"

The priest shrugged. "Is everything. Sanctification. Redemption. Everything."

Redemption. Alek knew what that word meant: forgiveness, for Debra and for himself, for allowing them to slip so far into the dark.

The man uncurled one of his hands like a gift. "It must be your decision."

The man was a priest. A Father.

"And you could be my son," he said, "if you so wish it."

Alek watched as his hand came off Debra's face and was slowly devoured by whiteness. He felt a chill in his blood at the contact that burned him as deep as a vow.

And then the priest pulled them easily from the stage and down into the darkness of his coat. And as a new fierceness of midwinter's snow began to fall he raised the loose, swirling folds of that coat and covered their heads against it as though it was a dark wing under which he had taken them.

Amadeus, Priest-warrior.

Amadeus, Covenmaster.

Magician.

His house was a magic castle walled in books and glowing with holy light and the perfumes of beeswax and incense, where the pasts of his people seemed to crumble away, and where each day was a step in some hallowed stairwell which might take them to the G.o.dhead itself one day. In the Covenhouse rooms seemed to gather themselves and stand starkly powerful around the lone individual, not frightening but surely full of years and history. The cells of the great house were like spare, individual statements of the soul, and the Great Abbey itself was like some lost temple out of a forgotten mythology.

But best of all, in the Covenhouse, no one asked about your sins.

"Who are you?" Alek asked quite suddenly at Amadeus's feet where the ancient man was seated in one of his straight-backed benches. Alek had been working up the courage to ask the question since the very first day, almost a week ago. And now, at last, he felt the courage break free from him and direct his words.

Amadeus stopped reading his ancient words from out of his Catechism, his fingers pausing in the middle of the page where they had been following the old scrawled inking. His blind eyes turned downward as if he could really see Alek there beside his sister and the other new kid, the one called Booker who never spoke very much. "A pilgrim, child," he answered.

Alek sat up, enchanted by this new discovery. "Like on the Mayflower?"

Amadeus smiled.

At his side, Debra turned her face away and began to sulk once more, not at all impressed by this wonderfully old young man. Stupid of her.

"And before, Father Amadeus?"

"Before what?"

"Before you were a Pilgrim."

"A pilgrim I have always been, my curious one." He turned the page. It was all he had offered and it was magic and amazing and Alek did not ask again.

"I hate him!" Debra shouted that night, her fists balled in her hair, her filmy red gown billowing under her sublime wrath. "There's something wrong with him."

Alek glared up sharply from the Catechism that Amadeus had lent him to read; it was the history of the Coven, explaining the origins of its Rites and ordinances, its purposes and designs, the vampire's relations.h.i.+p with the church and each other, all of it interesting. He turned up the oil lamp on the table beside the fascinating little book as Debra paced past, her hair writhing.

"They're dark," she complained miserably. She did not pause, not even a moment, like a lioness in a cage.

"What's dark?" she asked with teetering patience.

"His eyes."

"His eyes are light."

She paced.

He wants me to die.

Alek scowled up at her. "The Coven doesn't slay their own."

"They slay their mad."

"Amadeus doesn't think you're mad!"

"They hate their women."

Alek heisted. "They hate the unbound, Debra."

"So I have to be bound?"

"The Father said, that in time, maybe Booker--"

But she spun around too quickly, one hand darting out to strike the Catechism from the table. She struck the oil lamp by accident instead. The light guttered out, and almost at once the entire table was awash in hot oil.

"Debra!" he growled. "Debra, d.a.m.nit, look what you've done!" He peeled the ancient book off the table. It dripped despondently, and its words, in ink and sometimes in blood, were quickly running into nonsense on its pages.

"I hate him!" Debra shouted. "And I hate you for bringing us here!"

"What was I supposed to do? Where were we supposed to go?"

Debra crumpled down onto their bed, weeping.

Why was she acting like this, this way, now that they finally had a permanent home? Now that he had a permanent home? Or was that it? he wondered. Was she jealous because he was the center of Amadeus's attention instead of her? Because Amadeus said he saw great power and potential in Alek? It wasn't fair; d.a.m.nit, why was she spoiling his one chance to be happy?

With a little sigh of impatience he set the ruin of the book aside and went to her as he had always done and she clung to him and wept to him as if they were still all alone in the world, her hands desperate claws on his back, her face buried in the hollow of his throat. And then her cold lips rasped apart and he felt the familiar dent of her teeth on his flesh.

But bloodtaking was wrong. The Catechism said so. Amadeus said so. A priest had discipline and controlled the beast instead of letting it control him. Amadeus said they were all of two minds and that when you fell too far sometimes you couldn't come back. And then you were lost forever. That's why discipline was so important.

And so Alek moved her face down against the breast of the habit the Father had given him. Debra struggled against him, but he did not relent until she tired and stilled and slept in his arms. Alek put her to bed and pulled the handmade eiderdown quilt around her, gave her her Andy doll to hold. He kissed her piously on the forehead, then stepped back to watch the gray dolphin light float over her deceptively innocent-looking face. The light paled her skin, made her hair look brittle and ancient. Alek shuddered, feeling for just a moment that he was looking on the face of the unburied dead.

"Debra, what do I do with you?"

He picked up the Catechism and, wearily, a little fearfully, he went to find Amadeus and apologize.

The Father was meditating in the shadow of the altar of skulls when Alek found him, a wreath of serpents crawling around his neck, but not biting, never that. He didn't seem at all angry when he found out what had become of his book. He nodded. "It is time," he said only, and the sightless eyes set on Alek's face seemed to sink into some other place that Alek could not fathom, could not follow. As he watched, Amadeus rose and moved to one of the sets of crosswords and took down a katana longsword from off its moor. And then the Covenmaster knelt with him, one hand on the ornately-carved ivory hilt, the other on Alek's face.

"This sword," said Amadeus, "was forged by the first jonin, or ninja-master, Hattori Hanzo, and was blessed by the great Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu. It is a virgin; it has never been used in battl e. It is said that its master would live forever and rule the earth for a thousand years. And it is said the weapon would know its master when it met him and the two would be forged together for all time."

Alek looked down at the impressive forty-inch weapon and saw his own amazed eyes reflected in the flawless blade of the sword. Such art, such hungry art. He wondered what power had ordained him worthy of this great thing and was about to ask when he was silenced by the reflected image of the Covenmaster in the sword. Amadeus's eyes narrowed, pale as fired steel, sharp as the deadliest summer lightning. His hand coursed down over Alek's face like rain, touching his brow, closing Alek's eyes and caressing his lids so gently that he did not recoil.

"Truth is brewed in darkness, Alek. This is your first lesson."

Alek nodded, lost in Amadeus's created night. It was like pleasure without pain, like pain without the regret.

It was like Debra's sacred kiss transfigured into a touch, a thought, a place of thoughts, deep and intimate, both alien and hauntingly familiar. And in that personal night his hands were captured and set around the hard bonelike hilt of Hanzo's sacred sword.

"Make it a part of you forever, Alek, my Chosen One."

He tried to lift it, but it was so impossibly heavy. "I can't, Father..."

"You will. I will show you how and you will, my son."

Afterward, even as he slept in Debra's embrace, he felt the throbbing presence of the sword under his bed and heard the Father's last words to him that day echo down deeply into his subconscious like a promise or a prayer.

I will create you.

And five years later, he had.