Prologue

Having a great deal of time on their hands, and being a relatively closed society, all vampires were natural gossips. The old proverb that stated that one could trust only the dead with one's secrets did not take into account the vampire. They lived on secrets as much as on blood. They were avid voyeurs by nature. And what was gossip--and vampirism--but the act of subsisting on another's life? The slayer knew then, accordingly, that the story circulating around the East Village and parts of SoHo and Prospect Park had been embellished many times over and bore little if any resemblance to the truth. Still, he was prepared for anything. What else could he do? He could no more predict an unstudied vampire's reaction to an affront than he could pick through the tatters of downtown hearsay and determine the ultimate truth--if indeed, one existed.

In any event, Empirius, the proprietor of the Abyssus, a lower Lower East Side nightclub, and master of the hive of vampires contained therein, invited him in graciously. The slayer bowed low and kissed his ring. "Your Grace."

"Welcome," Empirius said in his sibilant whisper. He was impeccably dressed in a grey Armani suit, a red silk blouse, and a gold papal cross pinned up tight under his chin. His dark blonde hair was combed straight back and tied in a three-inch ponytail, noticeable when he canted his head to one side like a curious cat. His eyes were tiny but brilliant, the large black irises reflecting the light of the many votive candles like chips of flint. His smile showed a row of perfect teeth. "You look most...disarming tonight, Master Alek."

The old vampire had enough class not to say anything in response to the slayer's long-coated appearance, but he could not quite keep a malicious splinter of glee out of his bloodshot eyes. Already he was thinking of what outrageous tales he would spin for his thralls after this night was done. A slayer here to brush against the souls of the outcast in his coat and cloak of long hair, a warrior who wore his armor on the inside, Death, not Red but black and white--white-faced and black-clad, the lottery cast. But for whom? his eyes asked.

The pit was crowded tonight. The humans served and were served among the stained-glass images of redemption and repentance, the low stone altars and statues carved with sensual reverence. Spare, white-pale bodies like slaughtered swans lay here and there, alive, or nearly so. "Take me," they said to the slayer mistakenly, and "My blood is young." Others lied. "I've never been tasted" and "A virgin's nectar is the sweetest". It was their thoughts, their living emotions, as much as their words that the slayer encountered as he made his way to the bar.

The club was a swamp of incense, sandalwood or clove or some such sweet smoke undercut by the hot metallic tang of blood and passion. The slayer spotted a beautifully androgynous vampire bleeding a mortal boy perhaps no more than fifteen years. The boy's white flesh looked nearly translucent, the ropes of his young veins strained near to the point of collapse. It was probably his duty to intervene, except that from the gleam of old knowledge in the vampire's eye, the boy was probably a tenfold safer in its arms than on the street or in the overfilled holding cell of the communal NYPD bullpen downtown.

Still, the sight of the vampire's languid slat-ribbed whore sent a shiver down the slayer's spine. He'd been outside this crowd too long. He supposed he'd begun to believe on some subconscious level the esthetic tales of cinema vampires and vampire novels, the black cloaks and garlic and coffins and casual murders. If the vampire race were that stupid and evil it would not have survived this long. Were it not for his vampire, the boy, like so many other whores in other parts of the city, would probably be leading a miserable life as a slave to vice and one human pimp after another.

The slayer moved on.

Salvatori was behind the bar tonight. Greased and pinstriped, he looked as much the part of the Sicilian good fellow as Marlon Brando ever did in his heyday. He nodded at the slayer's approach and started the workings of a Long Island Ice Tea before the slayer shook his head no. Sal's eyebrows peaked. On duty?

"Good crowd?" the slayer asked, coming abreast with the bar.

"Always. Someone new every night. Don't know where they all come from. Masochism seems to be the thing. Must be the new city legislative."

"Possibly. So who's new?"

Sal shrugged. "No new vamps, just victims. Everyone wants to be a victim." He dropped his voice to a whisper and glanced around conspiratorially. "Personally, I think they just want to feel sorry for themselves, if you know what I mean."

Sal was a monster and a murderer, but no liar. There were no new vampires here that the slayer was consciously aware of. Disciples, yes, there were always those--deviants and lowlifes and groupies behind the mask of sanctified stone and veil, mortal prostitutes who serviced their masters' needs in exchange for the rare sweet high of blood loss that could be achieved through no known conventional drug. Then there were those who believed that if they commingled with the vampires they might somehow mystically gain the rare genetic factor that permanently separated the species. But nothing save the young boy from earlier was suspect here. Empirius ran his hive like a militia, with strict attention to etiquette. He never allowed rogues to remain within the walls of his establishment for long. Bad for business. If it got around the East Village that he was letting the psychotic muck of vampire society into his hive, if bodies started turning up in the Hudson or under bridges, the mortals were more apt to pilgrimage to some of the safer uptown clubs to get their fixes. Something like that could ruin a reputation.

Which led to another line of thinking.

"Where's Akisha?" the slayer asked.

Sal shrugged. "With Empirius?" He was shooting seltzer into a glass, trying to avoid talk and trying unsuccessfully to be casual about it. The slayer knew Sal had no more love of police than any of his mortal associates had during Prohibition. And with Coven there was always an added aspect of danger.

"Empirius is alone," the slayer stated. "Don't fuck me around, Sal."

Sal looked up, afraid. "Probably she's upstairs, sulking over some young god of a child. You know Akisha." He moved evasively to the side to attend a newcomer.

The slayer let him go. There was no reason to detain the barkeep over what was obvious. If he knew Akisha--and he thought he did--Salvatori was probably right. Among other talk in the Village was rumor that Akisha was phasing herself out of vampire society. The once proud and arrogant Black Queen was skulking free of her admirers' attention like some aging Hollywood actress craving the dark to hide her many shames. Some said it was age; other said she had changed since Empirius's victory in slaying the mad vampire cum alchemist Carfax and taking his queen as his own. It was rumored that Akisha wept for the first time in two centuries the day Carfax was destroyed. Was it not so far-fetched then to believe that her subsequent forced bonding to Empirius might have caused her enough bitterness to want to tarnish the name of her new lover with a few heinous crimes?

Darkness flickered at the tail of the slayer's eye and here she came, the mistress of the hive, the devilless herself, like something conjured by thought alone. She looked twenty-five or thirty, dressed in a black leather motorcycle jacket, short shiny-black pageboy hair contrasting beautifully with her skin, smooth and poreless like the best Han jade. Her left nostril was pierced through with a length of narrow chain that found its glittering way to her left ear. Empirius's mate had been experimenting with the industrial look so popular these days in the club and sub-culture scene, yet even so, Akisha had managed to loose nothing of the regality of her rich old shugo blood. Her eyes moved analytically across the room, then snapped around to find the slayer sitting alone and conspicuous in the center of her lover's hive.

"Alek," she said, coming upon him immediately. "It has been a long time, hasn't it? Business or pleasure?" She raised one raven-black brow in blatant challenge.

And he wanted nothing more than to answer her with a gentlemanly smile and respond the latter, but the night was wearing on, the random murders in the East Village accumulating, and the Coven's business could be put off only so long.

# # #

2

The long darkly-paneled room above the club was respected by all in the hive as Akisha's private space, a place of uninterrupted retreat where the Queen of the hive could lock herself away when her thinking grew too complex for distraction or she wanted to be alone with one of her boys. According to the stories the slayer had heard, not even Empirius was welcome here. So it came as something of a surprise when Akisha invited him up.

She lit a single candle and set it on the mantle as the slayer wandered soundlessly down the chamber. No less than four paintings of Akisha lined the gallery at the far end. The oldest was an ornate Romantic nude, possibly Matisse, except the colors looked too dark. A Klimt then. Changeless eternal Akisha. In every incarnation she had the same narrow hips and small high young-girls breasts, the slender long legs and warrior's muscle tone, the same somber dark eyes and shimmering fur-like hair. The second portrait was a Weimer Berlin, by the slayer's educated guess, this one a fully clothed Akisha in SS uniform. Long hair scraped back and severe, she stared out of the portrait with damning eyes, expression grimly defiant in a 1930's world that had gone mad around her. The third was a 1960's-style psychedelic kitsch of red and purple with a mermaid Akisha superimposed over a blazing red sun presumably going supernova on her.

The final painting was done by the slayer himself, with Akisha very much like she was right now, dressed in black satin and steel, her hair an arrogantly streaming cloak at her back. Although a product of the Absolute Realism school the slayer belonged to, the picture showed Akisha as only one of her own kind would see her, eyes diamond-hard and predatory and scarcely able to hide an ages-old lust.

Without ado, or excuse, Akisha went to a low stone divan and lay down over the gracefully slumbering body of her newest interest. A college boy he looked like, someone scarcely out of his virgin skin where vampire whores were concerned. His body had not yet acquired the gaunt paleness or loss of muscle tone so evident of an old hack. Holding the young man's body like a strange, Eastern-inspired Madonna, Akisha lapped at the rivulets of blood coursing down his face from the crown of barbed wire the slayer assumed the Queen herself had affixed to his shaven head.

The slayer shifted uncomfortably, turned away and began wandering among the tomes of Akisha's vaulted library, glancing at the swirl marks of fingerprints on ancient leather spines, the French and Portuguese and Cantonese gold leaf wearing to near illegibility. He let out his breath and sucked in the cottony scents of parchment and old oil paint and blood and sex in the room. He sighed. He was suddenly weary. At the end of the room he turned around and studied the living fresco before him. "Tell me, have you and Empirius been fighting again, Akisha?"

The young man stirred in his sleep and Akisha made motherly cooing noises until he was still again. She kissed his cheek like a young girl biting into a new golden fruit. She said, "He is master, I am his wench. Really, Alek, what is there to fight about?"

The words were meant to sound unbothered, but the bitterness in Akisha's voice was unmistakable. In many ways, the slayer could not blame her for that. Vampire society was by its very nature a primitive, essentially patriarchal setup. Males guarded their harems of females jealously, with the blood-bonded females forcibly dependent on them, especially during their periods of Bloodletting, a condition that struck them annually and transformed them into creatures little better than frenzied lionesses. It made them captive inside even the lenient circles of their own kind. Feminism and independence were difficult to cultivate in a race so dependent on its second half. Were something terrible to befall Empirius, Akisha would be forced to find another master to bind her or die on her own, unbound, within a year. But she could have done worse in the slayer's opinion; she could be bound to a far crueler master than Empirius. She could still be bound to Carfax, who'd had trouble discerning the difference between friend and experimental guinea pig. So in many ways she was right in her rage, but wrong in its direction. After all, to say Empirius cherished her was to say night is dark.

The slayer shook his head. "You're being evasive, treating me like police, Akisha."

"Are you in uniform?" She smiled with smeared red lips. "I think you are. You are like the Stazi now, or the Gestapo." She sucked in a breath, filtering a world of tastes through her Jacobson's organ, laying his intentions--including the forty-two inches of oiled steel under his coat--completely bare. "Yes," she said, her eyes slipping shut. "Like Gestapo, the sword is almost drawn."

It was difficult to guess if she was talking figuratively or not. The slayer approached her, his leather greatcoat drifting ambient as wings around his ankles. Akisha lifted her attention to meet him, her eyes gleaming in the dark as if she would welcome him to her little personal orgy if she could. If she thought he would stoop to that level. So beautiful were those eyes, like black pearls. The slayer went to one knee before the divan and put the back of his hand to her white cheek. He tried to see into her but Akisha's age and power prevented his penetration. Her motorcycle jacket was unzipped and he followed the chain around her neck to the miniature sickle of obsidian dangling between her breasts. It glimmered there like a talon and he found himself all but mesmerized by it as he spoke. "Are you in your period, Akisha? Tell me."

Akisha dropped her eyes to her beautiful young victim. Like the others, a crimson swan. Yet he breathed, his life's rhythm steady and content. A look of profound insight seemed to hover at the edges of his expression. Undoubtedly he was having the deepest, most evocative dreams of his young life. Like some worshiper of the water pipe in a London opium den, a bomb could have fallen over the city and he would remain undisturbed in his mistress' playground of the mind.

"Does it seem that I am?" Akisha asked innocently.

The slayer glanced aside and said, "The city is understandably disturbed by these murders. Missing children, rumors of bodies picked clean of meat, of blood. The police are calling it Vulture Murders. You can imagine." He found himself whispering as though her victim were a young child in need of his sleep. And surely he was; how else would he endure yet another night of so dark a passion with his mistress? The thought caused a stir deep in the slayer's belly and loins that he put aside immediately as ridiculous. It was nothing but emotional shrapnel from another life. "This thing--it could have repercussions. The stories...I'm only seeking the truth."

She watched him intimately. She smiled. So near and tainted with her lover's life and her face gained such wistfulness the slayer sometimes wondered if only he ever saw in it. "And so the Coven sends forth their gallant knight-errant to slay the dragon. How old-fashioned. What about the other possibility? This is New York City. Human beings are still capable of deviant behavior, or has the Coven forgotten that?"

"That possibility exists," he admitted. "I'm not certain if they suspect someone or if they merely feel the need to investigate. But either way, it's become my problem."

Akisha reached for him. He closed his eyes and followed her presence as it closed in on him over the prone body of the child. It glowed darkly, her presence, like a living cloak. He shifted his weight and moved his hand down an inch. He automatically brushed the hilt of the sword under his coat.

Akisha's bitterly sweet lips hovered an inch from his throat. "You still don't trust me, do you, Alek? So long I've known you, known all your secrets and not spoken a word. But you will not trust me..."

He waited in defiance of her words. No razor-sharp instrument slashed his face or cut his lip or throat. He opened his eyes and there was just Akisha in all her cold black-and-white beauty. He shook his head and looked away. "You have the Book of Deborah on that shelf over there," he said. "One of the Apocryphal books. It was edited from the final text of the Bible in the Tenth Century by King James."

"You are changing the subject."

"No…this is the subject."

"What? Censorship?"

"Yes," he said. "No one ever has the whole story. Only fragments, rumor. But rumor is dangerous. A rumor can destroy a man. Or a species."

Akisha locked her jaw.

He touched her hair compulsively. Oriental silk--real when so much else was not. "Tell me the story. Tell me who is murdering these children. I have to know, Akisha. I can't walk away otherwise."

"Empirius," she said, closing her eyes, "does not harbor rogues."

"Perhaps he does not know this one well enough."

"Empirius knows everything about everyone."

"Then perhaps Empirius is being set up by someone wanting his downfall?"

Akisha laughed. "With Empirius gone I would be sole ruler of the vampires here until I became again bound. My period is in three months. Do you think I am doing all this terrible murder so Empirius is ruined and I am widowed and powerful for all of ninety days?"

He shook his head at her wryness and wound a lock of her hair around his finger. He sensed her cold--her sudden thrill of fear of him because he was one of the few threats she still continually faced in her unchanging, uncomplicated life. "I think you know much," he said. "You always did."

Again the innocence like a little-loved veil seemed to fall over Akisha's face. Her sudden look was feverish, almost desperate to speak. And yet she held it all in check. "I think," she said after a moment, "that you should join us tonight, unseen. I can tell you no more than that."

3

As the slayer wandered down the streets he noticed men and women walking past on either side, completely unaware of what moved in their midst.

It was late Sunday afternoon and the tourists were emerging from Broadway matinees and dinner at Mama Leone's and being safely bussed back to their suburbs in Jersey and Connecticut. There was a young mother with a little girl standing outside of the Winter Garden Theatre where it seemed Cats had been playing forever. The little girl, whose eyes had been turned forlornly to the wintry grey sky only a moment ago, suddenly dropped her gaze and centered it on him.

And for one spare moment he saw himself through her eyes--long black hair, thick like fur, falling around a thin white face and two black eyes, a long leather coat, the swift sensuality of a snake or monster or something just as alien. He caught himself like a vain man with the annoying habit of studying his reflection in every mirror he passed and tucked his conscious eye back into the pocket of his own flesh where it belonged.

The girl's eyes widened. What did she see? Only a tall strange man all in black? Or was it death-in-waiting? If only he could know. The girl turned to tell her mother something, but already he was gone, dissolved back into the onrushing current of society where the carpet of concrete could usher him along anonymously toward the place where all his decisions would be made in only a few hours.

4

"The day before He suffered to save us and all men, he took offering in his hands and looking up to heaven, to you, his almighty Father, he gave you thanks and praise. He broke the bread, gave it to his disciples, and said: Take this, all of you, and eat it: this is my body which will be given up for all of you. When the supper had ended, he took the cup. Again he gave you thanks and praise, gave the cup to his disciples, and said: Take this, all of you, and drink from it: for it is the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me.

"My people, let us proclaim the mystery of faith. Our Father, we celebrate the memory of Christ, your son. We your people and ministers recall his passion, his Resurrection and his Ascension, and from the many gifts you have given us we offer to you, God of glory and life eternal, this holy and perfect sacrifice: this child of God who is now the body of Christ and the cup of eternal salvation which is His life's blood."

For a moment Empirius glanced down at the young human man bound to the blood-blackened altar at the center of his club. The look clouding the young man's eyes was one of utter acceptance and submission. Not forced worldly misery as like so many of the children who visited the club and mingled with the damned. This was not pretend. He was one of the Elect and proud to serve as such. He was one with the people. Empirius smiled on him in the smallest, most meaningful way. Then he took up the steel knife lying beside the chalice on the pall and, with that gesture, dragged the instrument across the young man's throat. Blood pumped out of the open wound, washing the dark altar stone, darkening it farther. The young man gulped compulsively as his life pulsed out of his body in thick almost-purple pulses. Empirius placed the chalice under the torrent of blood and filled it halfway to the rim with the hot crimson liquid. When the air became charged with the radiant fragrance of life eternal, an audible sigh ran through the congregation of vampires gathered for Mass

"Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, and said, "Take: eat, this is my body, broken for you." And with that and a surgeon's precision, Empirius sliced deep into the meat of the boy's thigh.

5

Alone in the aftermath of Mass--by now the others had returned to their warrens and city apartments--Empirius knelt down before the altar and sipped the remaining blood off the stone. The warmth entered the frozen labyrinth of his cold-blooded body like a mere whimper compared to the raw primal roar of a true feeding, a true death. No matter how many times he tried to convince himself that the mechanics of the Mass might indeed be the redemption he and his people had so long sought, he could never overcome his contempt for the difficult process, the Election, the policing of slayers and the Coven and all the things that existed to deaden the hunt to him and to his fellows. Cursed by memory and by age, he still recalled the sweet burning rage of the predatory hunt and kill, the food of victory. For all the many miseries his state of existence had cost him, the days of mankind's ignorance and the vampire's absolute freedom were ingrained in his makeup for all time. The boy had died thinking he would return as one of them, and that was well enough. It was better that the children died thinking so, less chaotic, but unfulfilling too. Even as his fingernails dug into the soiled stone and his lips sought even the smallest warmth remaining, specters of past victims surrounded him, mocking him with their ultimate victory: the great and ancient Venetian vampire lord Empirius was scrabbling at the blood of the dead like a starved creature!

He sat back quite suddenly. A door had closed at the back of the vacant club, the sound as great as a gunshot in the silent chamber. In the corner of the catwalk that circumvented the pit a figure materialized, dark on dark, too dark for even Empirius to recognize it at first. He jerked backwards a step and narrowed his eyes. "Who's there? Akisha? Salvatori?"

And then the figure stepped forward, and the darkness came off of it, and Empirius felt the laughing, mocking ghosts cluster about him to witness his doom.

6

The slayer stepped forward, a hand on the hilt of his sword in the event Empirius drew a challenge, and began the slow descent down the stairs into the pit. The slayer knew it would have been over much faster in a surprise attack--faster and far tidier--but nowhere near what he wanted. A dead vampire, no answers to his many questions. No.

"Ah...Master Alek."

The slayer sighed. "I thought perhaps it was one of your young thralls, one of their perversities," he whispered. "But you?" He tilted his head. "Empirius?"

The vampire's pose relaxed. In less than a blink of an eye he went from absolute guard to absolute openness, as if he'd come to the conclusion that there was nothing to defend, no reason to panic and work his persuasions now. He would not beg. The slayer knew that.

"How did you see?" he asked, taking a step forward in defiance of his fear. "Where were you? Not among the Mass? You couldn't have seen--"

"I saw through your eyes, Your Grace."

Empirius laughed appreciatively, wiping the blood from his face. "And I did not even feel your presence inside of me. God bless him, Amadeus must be a proud Covenmaster to have such an acolyte as you, Master Alek."

The slayer drew his sword on reaching the bottom of the pit. It all but sung in the spare light of the city filtering in through the stained blue glass of the windows. For the first time in many years, the slayer felt its streamlined weight in his wrist and elbow. Quite absently, as if to put off the task at hand, he glanced sidelong at the intricately engraved asps entwined in white jade that made the hilt of the Double Serpent Katana. There was a story that the wielder of this katana would one day be a ruthless hunter.

He said, "Why, Your Grace?" He shook his head. "Your reputation was admirable. Mortals donated their blood and bodies to your flock every night. You wanted for nothing. Why bring yourself to this?"

Empirius smiled as he considered his blood-soiled altar. Dressed now in his papal robes and dark purple mantle as he was he cut the figure of an ancient like few vampires could. It was his eyes; the age was less a parody in them than most. When he spoke of the Crusades, the Reformation, war, it was with a jaded wisdom not to be found in any but the oldest of souls. He said now with muted amazement, "Do you know, Master Alek, that many of my flock have grown to consume flesh with little or no problem? Even some of the elders?"

"I noticed. Why do I care? Why do you?"

Again Empirius laughed, this time with disgust. "When God put you together, my slayer, He was kind and brilliant, to be sure. And because of that fact, or perhaps despite it, you are an ignorant creature. You, the dhampiri, have never had to subsist on blood. How could you know the wonder of what you beheld this night?" He spread his hands as though to bestow a benediction. "The glory of it?"

The slayer stepped forward and Empirius's attention automatically snapped to the sword at the slayer's side. "What I beheld was a felony. What I beheld could easily raise a third Inquisition. I fail to see the religious significance of that."

"I am curing my people with salvation."

"There is no salvation for us," the slayer whispered. "There is only control. Don't make excuses."

"I am not. You want answers to my intentions. I am merely giving them to you."

The slayer let out his breath; the temperature inside the club was so low it plumed like a ghost in the dark. For a moment the clockless silence seemed to echo to the very height and breadth of the building. "And," he said, "do they believe that--do they believe that your communion will save them?"

"Why do you care?" Empirius mocked him.

"I don't. I just want to know."

"Vampires believe no more in heaven or hell than mortal men. No angels or devils make themselves apparent to us, no matter what the paperback lies say," Empirius answered. "I am sorry if this disappoints you, slayer, but it is true. It is all a matter of Faith."

"And do you believe in your salvation?" the slayer whispered.

"I believe as much in my faith and my purpose as the Pope does his."

"And what does that mean?"

"Nothing," said Empirius. "It means nothing. You did not come here to duel in philosophies with an old man. You came here to fulfill your master's will. So let it be." Unlacing his fingers, the old vampire genuflected before his altar and placed his ear to the bloodstained surface of it. He closed his eyes, his mouth a straight line of determined surrender.

For a moment the slayer was disoriented and he wondered if Empirius was working some form of influence over him. A large part of him stood ambivalent to the whole thing, and that part wondered wistfully if there would be a happy ending after all. But a greater part knew the answer to that question. There were no happy endings, just inevitable conclusions. The Coven would not have taken notice of this situation if anything but this type of work were required. The vampires policed themselves. The Coven made it so. If justice were not meted out, the mechanics by which the vampires had come to terms with Rome and human civilization would be jeopardized.

Yet that wasn't enough this time. Jesus, Empirius was all but a celebrity in his people's minds. The slayer had to reach much farther this time--for a fault, for the desecration of a perfect human life. The young body of the sacrificed boy had been picked clean by the congregation, the blood drained like a wineskin. The slayer closed his eyes and reformed the child's face in the private slideshow of his mind, his drowning face, the belated regret stamped so cruelly on his features. And with that vision, he asked himself why he had waited until the end, what madness had held him sealed to the spot outside the club. And in response to that he swept forward with the dangerous catlike grace so long ingrained in his makeup and training and took a handful of Empirius's hair in his fist and jerked the sharp of the sword across the back of Empirius's neck and closed his eyes and heard nothing but blood flow and fingernails screeking on altar stone in a dying death grip, and the sound filled his head like a migraine and pained his teeth.

7

Akisha sat bolt upright in the black satin bed she shared with her bonded mate, and her involuntary shout was a wolf howl of both agony and release.

8

The letting of blood stained the walls and floor of the club like paint across an artist's loft.

The slayer went to the bar and uncorked a bottle of White Russian, pouring three-finger's worth into a glass stein. On the floor lay the body of Empirius, mangled in death and beauty. Another swan, but slaughtered, this one. It lay crumpled and fetal and awaiting the strange funerary practices of his kind--the loving evisceration and ritual consumption of the vitals and fluids, the butterflied flesh allowed to smolder in the rising day--the practices the slayer himself could scarcely remember they were so strange.

He took a quick pull off the whiskey bottle and then went to retrieve the severance where it had rolled just behind the altar. He dropped it into the gunnysack tied to his belt under his coat. The will of the master, of the Coven, be fulfilled, he thought as he heard the slam of the body that had fallen to the floorboards above his head, the rat-like scratch of fingernails seeking purchase in pain and release. Akisha would survive her freedom like she had survived her bondage. Akisha, in her cunning, had outlived nations.

Her revenge was complete.

The Coven's will fulfilled.

Taking the bottle, the slayer retreated to the door of the club, his eyes full of liquid night and a hand pressed to his mouth to stop the first cup coming back up his throat.